50 Cent Cigarettes????

I signed up for NewspaperArchive.org just now, and this is the second article I found in my old local newspaper... (1970)

The cost of smoking is already up

You've heard the story.

It's the one about the guy who made a New Year's
resolution to quit buying cigarettes. He didn't give
up smoking, just paying for the cigarettes
That idea may become a reality for cigarette
smokers in the mid-Mon Valley area when the price
of cigarettes officially goes up at one minute after
midnight tonight.

Legislation boosting the state levy from 13 cents
per pack to 18 cents — highest in the nation — was
sent to Gov. Raymond Shafer last week when the
Senate gave final legislative approval by a 41-1 vote.
'Making the change'

Because the measure calls for it to become effective
immediately upon Shafer's signature, the governor
will not sign it until midnight — to give wholesalers
and dealers time to make necessary adjustments.
"We've been making the change on our machines,"
said Bill Sapone of Monessen, a cigarette
machine distributor. "The process isn't difficult with
our newer machines, but it can be quite a job with
the older ones."

The newer machines, which can be adjusted for
the new 50 cents per pack...

An Open Letter To Popular Science

Dear PopSci,

Why do you allow scam artists to advertise in your magazine? Are you really so hard up for money that you need to allow these people to share space with you just to survive?

You have published articles about how bad science does bad things for people, and then right at the end of the magazine you allow a scammer to purchase a full page ad telling people how they are drinking filth and how the only pure water they can count on comes through them.

Your sister magazine, last month, did multi-page piece on which "As Seen On TV" products were bullshit and yet at the end of the magazine there are ads for penis growth pills and fake natural cures. Why don't you go after your own advertisers if you want to pretend to care about your readers getting scammed?

I remember back in 8th grade It used to be amusing to flip to the back of your magazine and see what crap idiots were being scammed into spending money on. Over the past couple of decades you have become more than a magazine of "possible future cars" and you have started publishing articles on real science, real trends, real inventions and real science.

I don't expect you to do the Good Housekeeping thing. You don't have to verify and give a thumbs up to every product you have an ad for in your magazine, but when you put your sights on real science and allow ads for "Magic Sex Pheromones" - you come off looking like douchebags.

The worst part is that you will break up your major articles so that people are forced into the quack medical ads, or scientific conspiracy theory ads, if they want to read the rest of a really good story on global climate change.

Yes I know this helps you sell ads. But maybe you'd sell ads to the right people if they didn't have to associate themselves with worthless coins collections, crappy watches, penis growers, water purifiers and miracle heaters that must break the laws of physics to do 1/2 of what the ad claims.

Get your act together.

Stepping Out (a nostalgic ramble)

Yesterday was just one of those days.

It's hard to even put into words how everything can come together on certain days to bring you right back to where you were when you were a kid. Just driving up the road to get some lunch I found myself remembering the first warm days of the year when I was in Jr. High. I remember jumping off of the bus, on to my bike, and riding it down to my friends house making sure to leave my jacket at home because I would not bow down to the cold that would come after dusk. That would mean admitting defeat. It would mean admitting that it wasn't yet summer.

I was once called an idiot for being nostalgic, for holding on to the past the way that I do.

At the time, I was shocked to hear it. Not because I agreed with the statement but because people could actually think that way. The past should somehow be shoveled into a garbage bag and put out on to the street instead of having it's place in your life? I always felt that they should be treasured. Especially the good moments. Especially the events and people who changed your life. Especially the moments where you felt alive - physically or mentally.

But of course, you can't tell me something like that without it sticking in my brain. When I stepped outside yesterday it was also a cause for me to step outside myself to think about what made me who I am, and it kind of hit me finally. Why am I generally more nostalgic than everyone else?

For example, I have an old video game collection that includes Atari 2600 games, Intellivision, and Colecovision. I collect those little LED Football games from the late 70's. I have a giant plastic tub full of Transformers, and another one full of Legos. I have two different boxes of papers, notes, pictures, fliers and random crap from me teenage years. I have two video tapes of my friends and me hanging out and drinking beer. I even have a Star Wars coin-op in my basement because, when I was a kid, it was my favorite arcade game.

I like finding old friends, saying hi just to see how they are doing. I've recently found a lot of old friends and I genuinely enjoy catching up, either through email or through a few empty beer bottles down at Jacks. Hell, I'm flying to Vegas in March to hang out with some old friends who live there.

Most people aren't like me. I accept that. But why am I like this? Like I said earlier - I think I figured it out. It has to do with where I grew up. Monongahela, Pennsylvania, population 1700. The part of Monongahela I grew up in, the number was closer to 50.

That means that while everyone else in my graduating class of 400+ kids had an entire community of kids to hang out with - I had something like 4.

Of those 4 only one of them was in my grade. Only one other Senior was on the school bus with me during my Sr. Year. (He wouldn't have been in my graduating class if his mother didn't force him to repeat 2nd grade!)

So imagine my early teen years - being isolated meant that you kind of had to hold on to your friends. If Kirk pissed me off there was no walking away and hanging out with someone else. We had to figure out our differences and deal with it. (Or walk another 5 miles to find someone else to play army with.) When he got his first girlfriend and disappeared for a few months, I didn't just hang up on him when he called and wanted to hang out again, I came down and we picked up where we left off.

Yeah sure over the years he and I drifted pretty far and now days we barely see each other, but when he called me last year and asked me to come camping with him, there was no doubt in my mind we should hang out, yet again.

That is kind of like how I've treated my entire life. Old friends are still friends. Old memories are still a part of me.

These things made me who I am, and if a warm day in the middle of winter makes me think about jumping on my bike to hang out with a friend - I have no problem being a nostalgic idiot.

The Ruining Of The National Anthem

Am I the only person who is tired of seeing R&B singers fuck up the National Anthem?

I don't know when it started, sometime in the 80's I suspect, but it became popular for R&B artists to fuck up the national anthem. Some of you may not have noticed, but the word land should take less than 15 seconds to sing and should contain 45 different notes.

"...And the LAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaAAAAAANnnnnnnnnnnnnnNNNNnnnNNnNnnnnNNnnnddd"

I can't argue that most of these performers have fantastic singing voices. Some are even phenomenal artists who write their own music. I'm not saying that these are talentless attempts to sing, I'm saying that I don't want to hear someone trying to 1-up Mariah Cary's 40 second vibrato of the word "free" by doing their own 45 second version, with twice as many pitch changes.

So they have changed the notes, changed the tune, changed the timing... may as well complete the cycle and change the words too...

Oh, say, can ya see, by the sun's big bright light,
What so proudly we saw at the twilight's gleam-gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, we put up a hell of a fight.
For the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly ga-gleaming?
And the rockets' red glare, big ass bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof in the night that our flag was still there.
UH HUH UH HUH!
O shit, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
For the land of the free and the home of my homies?

F You Tom!

Myspace has always had a love/hate relationship with it's users. People liked to use the site because it allowed them to connect, or stay in touch with, friends from all over the glob, but Mypace has never quite delivered on the promise of being a decent place to spend your time.

Let's look at some of their failures up close:

• Blogs - I was always convinced that Myspace tossed in the blog tool simply because they read about it being a cool new tool that all the kids were using. They never put any time into actually making the tool useful. Or stable. When it wasn't "down for maintenance" they were making ridiculous changes that would ban you from trying to insert perfectly valid links to sites that you wanted people to see. No RSS feeds, no networks, not useful.
  
• SPAM - I have always felt that the SPAM problem on Myspace wasn't really that big of an issue to the people who run the site. Would anyone really be surprised if they found out that Myspace was making money off of the very same spammers they were pretending to stop? Sure you may read how Myspace sued a few spammers, but I wonder if they just went after the spammers who weren't giving them 10% of the cut.
• Ads - Even their legitimate advertisers were an annoyance. Between the ads that made noises, forcing you to hit your mute button while at work, and the constant deluge of singles ads that insulted your intelligence - I was almost happy to see the BRIGHT BLINKY ANNOYING CLICK ME NOW ads!
• Names - When I created my first account on Myspace 5 years ago I was really disappointed by their lack of maiden name support. How could I find an old friend of mine if she got married and changed her last name? I wrote to support and suggested this feature. I'm sure I wasn't the first to do so either. Yesterday, January 27th 2009, I got an email from Tom telling me that they finally have maiden name support. Wow that must have been a lot of work to put an extra freaking name field into the database and to toss the extra line of code into the profile editor. This is a perfect example of why Facebook is now kicking Myspace's ass.
• Accessability - Unless you have a fairly new computer with a fairly decent connection, forget about Myspace. Their phone/portable version of the site is sloppy, poorly featured, and buggier than a homeless guy's groin. On slower computers their ads (see above) can slow you down to a standstill. (This is because they accept/use ads that use what is called "Alpha Channel" in their animations. Alpha'd stuff takes a BIG hit on your CPU.)
  
• Community - The biggest failure, in my book, was their total inability to help grow individual communities within the site itself. Say you wanted to talk to people from Tampa to find out some info about the town before you fly in for the Superbowl. Your only real choice is to find a group with the word "Tampa" in it and hope to find someone who actually reads their poorly designed groups. Then you could try to get some answer from them. Most people have given up on the groups, because again, they are poorly managed and nearly impossible to use.
• Bands - I feel bad for the bands who try and use this shitty site to promote themselves. I mean yeah it's a great place to slap your music up, but have you ever seen what these poor bastards have to do to reach their fucking audience? They can't send a message to all of their friends. Nope. They can't invite more than 200 people to an event - and even that is painful. They can't count on anyone actually using the MySpace calendar because Myspace no longer cares about events or helping people find them. (If anyone disagrees with me here, please tell me the last time you used their calender to find something to do!)
• Fuck Tom - Seriously. Change your goddamn picture. Stop sending me messages as if you are a real dude and not some poorly paid shift worker who was told to spam out a message to the users. Just dump the lie and fess up to being a 300 person company who spends most of your time sorta trying to fix the broken shit and ZERO percent of your time trying to make good tools.

Thankfully, I'm not the only person who is done with Myspace. I started this blog a short while ago because I was fed up with their garbage. I'm using Facebook more and more because it's always up, because they have working tools that make sense. Because this blog can be RSS fed direclty into my Facebook profile as a note - and networked via their Blog Networker.

Yeah sure I'll keep my Myspace page around. I still have my Friendster page up afterall.

Mythbust This...

Dear Jamie & Adam,

I have noticed that, in the past two seasons of Mythbusters, that you haven't really busted any myths.

Let's be fair here, your James Bond specials were entertaining, but what you recreated at your M5 Studio wasn't really a myth, was it? I mean nobody seriously believed that most of the gadgets that Bond used were real. What's next? Are you going to bust Star Wars and tell us that lightsabers don't exist or that there is no way that two swinging logs could crush the head of a ATST.

There have been a few episodes where you have built a gadget to see if it would really work, but that's not really a myth now is it? Like those anti-gravity devices - even the one that worked was clearly documented as an air-pusher years before you put it near the gravity field detector. Or the water stun gun? It wasn't a myth, it's a gadget that someone once tried to get working. You didn't really get it working either. Not a myth, sorry.

Nor is it a myth when you find an internet video and prove it real or fake. You once did an entire show on the Mentos/Coke thing and yet any kid with $2.00 and a nearby grocery store could have told you that it wasn't a myth. Fine, you spun it to look like you were trying to show which chemicals were responsible for the reaction, but really, that's better suited for an episode of Good Eats than an episode of Mythbusters.

So fine, we have established that you aren't really busting myths anymore...

How about you do something interesting?

• Bigfoot! How about you settle this shit once and for all. Fake everything like you did with the moon landing special and then show us how easy or hard it would be to make up all of that evidence. Make comparisons between footprints from various periods and places and see if they are even close to being the same. Go out there and really nail this damn thing. Maybe blow up a Bigfoot suit at the end of the episode.
• Shamwow, let's test this bastard out. What's it made of? Sheepskin like a chamois? Synthetic fiber or Bigfoot fur? Does it really suck orange soda through carpeting and what applications would it have in the porno industry? Maybe get Kari involved in this during ratings sweeps week.
  
• UFO's of course need looked at. Find some of those bastards who say that they have been abducted like, Whitley Streiber, and hook them up to a lie detector. Maybe follow him around for a year so that when he writes, in his next book, about being abducted on July 15th, you can show the world your spycam footage of him bullshitting with his wife about how he's going to fake a good story for that night. Maybe put some lights up in the sky to see how many people say it's a UFO, and show people how easy it is to fake a UFO with, pretty much, anything that is round and throwable.
• Paris Hilton. Just why the fuck is she famous anyway? I don't know how you would test this but blowing her up at the end of the episode would be fucking brilliant!
• Mythbusters! How about you expose some of the myths of the show itself. Like those scenes where you try something out in the field, then go back to M5, and then go back out in the field with something new - everyone is dressed the same. How about, on a show where you talk about the truth, you don't let your editors fuck with the timeline of how your week went? If Grant had his golfing machine out on the same day that they all drove balls manually- say so. Also those crappy little scripts that you invariably make Torri read are unnecessary. Having him explain physics to us, as if he just thought that shit up himself, is an insult to our intelligence. Why not just use the announcer the way he was intended to be used?
  
• Comcast/FIOS/Direct TV. The American people really need you to answer this debate once and for all. Who really does have the most HD channels? How much does Comcast degrade their HD signal? Who has the most channels? Who has the best price? The winner gets to air parts of your episode as their commerical.
• General Tso - Where the hell do these people who own Chinese restaurants get trained to cook like that. The dishes that they cook up are NOT in any way related to what they would be cooking in China. Is there some big school for Chinese Restaurant Cooking where they can teach me how to count out exactly 5 shrimp per Triple Delight?
• The Ghost Hunters - Wouldn't that just be the awesomeness? Adam and Jamie could go out and prove that The Ghost Hunters are full of shit. Maybe sit down and ask them, "If people see ghosts all of the time, why do you only film at night with the lights out? Is it because the loss of definition of a nightvision camera helps you make shit up?"
  

It's Amazing I Ever Got Married (Stories 1 & 2)

STORY ONE

Throughout high school I was known as a nerd. It was so bad that my long term girlfriend had to be from another school where nobody knew that I liked to play with computers. During one brief breakup I did date a girl from my school, but she was in Jr. High and had no idea about the intensity of disdain that most people viewed me with.

So when I started hanging out at the mall or South Park it started to sink in as fact that as long as I talked to a girl who wasn't from Elizabeth Forward High School, I actually stood a chance at scoring a date with her. Because of the life-long ego-beating I was given, I never really set my sights too high and when I did I would invariably fuck things up.

For instance there was Kelly.

That's not her real name. I don't remember her real name.

What happened was that one weekend while her parents were away I was invited to a party at her house with a few of my friends. We arrived and things were going well when drama strikes. I play the concerned guy, help to calm things down and Kelly hints that we should go out sometime. I jump on the chance without thinking things through. You see, if I had paused for a few minutes, I would have realized that she was way to hot for me.

She was something along the lines of 5'4", beautiful face, great smile, wonderful tight 80's jeans and a rack that would make a moose jealous. Cheerleader, model, kind of intelligent too. I'm sure that right now, if I could remember her name and look her up, she's still freaking hot.

Well my loser ass did not have a license, or a car, and she had to pick me up at my moms house. None of this turned her off, but she did ask that I drive back to the part of town where the movie theater is.

About halfway to the theater, on a long and windy road, there stood a cocky groundhog on the white line of the road. Standing there - he looked right at me - our eyes connected and he didn't blink. Neither did I. I totally forglot about Kelly and the fact that we were on a date and that this is her car.

I plowed right over that mutherfucker.

(As an aside, I'd like to say that killing things isn't cool. I was a retarded teenage kid then. I grew up being taught that the only good ground hog was the kind who used his body to feed the opossums. Now, I think it's stupid to kill something that you won't eat yourself.)

Kelly screams, "Oh my god! You hit him on purpose didn't you?"

At this point I still had an out. I could have said that I was trying to swerve or that I thought he was going to run to the left so I turned the wheel right. I could have lied...

If you have read this far, you know I didn't. I told her the truth. She was upset and I tried dealing with it. We watched the movie and we drove home and she was ice cold to me. No kiss, no feel, no ever talking to her again. I went from uber geek loser in high school, to idiot redneck jerkwad with her circle of friends.

STORY TWO

I was living in Oakland at the time with someone who I'm sure would rather go unnamed. It was right before I got involved in my next long-term relationship and there wasn't much to do in the morning besides listen to crappy radio morning shows.

The Rovolution (104.7) was having a Dating Game type of contest. I, having nothing better to do at that time of the morning, decided to call in. Asluck would have it I got on the show with my frist try.

It was me, some other dude and a girl who had to pick between us. The prize was dinner, drinks and a limo ride all around Pittsburgh. I didn't care so much about the date, but the dinner and drinks sounded nice and what the heck maybe the girl would be cute.

Well as the show goes on I'm stomping this guy's ass into the ground. His answers are boring and cliche. She laughed at all of my answers and asked me follow up questions. I had no doubt in my mind that this limo trip, and possibly the girl, were mine!

That's when we went to commerical.

We come back on the air and the DJ is hosting the "call in and help the girl pick" segment of the show. It goes pretty well with most of the girls picking me, that is until one girl gets on the phone and says something along these lines...

"Oh my god. Nathaniel Beall? I went to school with him and he was such a nerd! He was all into computers and stuff. Dungeons and Dragons too I'm sure. Like the biggest nerd you could ever image. Revenge of the nerds type nerd. But with long nasty hair. Do not pick him, trust me!!!"

I almost hung up right there.

The DJ asked me if I had a response. I couldn't outright deny being a nerd. That would never play. The best I could do was be cool enough to cast doubt on this girl's version of reality.

"I have no idea who that was, likely just another girl who I shot down."

(Ohhh smooth huh? I'm not sure what's worse. Running over an innocent little animal, on purpose, while on a first date with a hottie, or uttering the typically stupid "She's just mad because she can't have my dick" comeback.)

I was sunk. 15 seconds later she picked the other guy and yet again my loserdom was exposed to the world - only this time it's not a small circle of friends. It's the entire listening area of The Revolution radio station.

I take solace in knowing that the girl from my HS, whoever she is, is likely on Facebook or Myspace now being the nerd she accused me of being.