Young and Aspiring

I’d just like to apologize to you all in for the general lack of effort I’ve put into this site lately. My computer is so slow that trying to do anything other than type up a simple post in notepad.exe is a major task requiring more time then I’m willing (or able) to put forth. I should be getting a new computer very soon though, at which point I intend on spending more time on the site. It’s always sitting in the back of my head bugging me because I know there are sections that aren’t updated or working, the archives aren’t up to date, I haven’t added galleries for awhile or changed the featured MP3s, but I haven’t forgotten about any of these things, so please don’t lose hope in the site.

So I’m sitting here working on getting some reading done for a course required for my major (art), the course is “senior seminar”, and the reading is a chapter from “Currents – Contemporary Direction in the Visual Arts” by Howard Smagula. It’s tough reading for me, since the content isn’t very interesting, but I came across a paragraph in a section about Joseph Beuys that I found to be pretty cool:

After the war he enrolled in a natural-science program at a nearby university. Beuys had always been quite interested in zoology throughout his childhood. Elaborate notebooks were filled with detailed information on his collections of insects, mice, fish, and butterflies. He even had a small amateur laboratory set up at his home for experiments. He was not at the university long, however, before he grew disillusioned with the way science was taught. After his brush with death and his ‘rebirth’, scientific study, as it was taught then, seemed inadequate to address the central issues of life and existence that obsessed him. Beuys recalled with particular horror a lecture given at the University of Posen by a biology professor who had devoted his life to studying amoebae that phylogenically seemed to exist somewhere between plant and animal life. Here was a distinguished professor, a paradigm of rational thought and knowledge, who had devoted the better part of his life to studying this miniscule, fuzzy animal-plant, plant-animal. A feeling of dread flowed through Beuys as he listened to the droning voice of the professor and stared at the out-of-focus slide of that one-celled form. He left the program that afternoon. Throughout the rest of his life, the image haunted the artist and reconfirmed his belief that societal over-specialization has greatly contributed to meaningless work and empty lives. There’s a lot I could say about that, but I’m just going to leave it as is, if you took the time to read it hope you can relate to it in some way.

Free stuff: Innerwear Condoms, towels, hemp, St. Pauli Girl shirt, board game, and quite possibly the most useless freebie of all time… An Arabian Horses DVD. Also, if you happen to be looking for a free webhost, shyper.com looks pretty awesome, check it out.

Speaking of free stuff… There’s another site like freeipods.com and freeflatscreens.com, called FreeDesktopPC.com… You need ten referrals for this one though, which is alot harder than the five required for the iPod. But I figured I’d post it on here anyway and if you feel that you can get ten people to sign up (and complete one of the free offers, which does require a credit card, but doesn’t have to cost you a cent if you do it correctly, as discussed earlier) then you might as well give it a shot.

By the way, one of the free offers you can complete is stamps.com, which apparently comes with a free digital scale, so I’m gonna check that one out. I finally just ordered a new Dell which I’m pretty excited about because this computer is so slow, but I wouldn’t mind getting a free desktop… I’ll uh, donate it to charity, and save babies from falling into a well with rusty spikes at the bottom and piranhas and SARS and cigarettes and carbs and all kinds of terribly threatening stuff… Especially the carbs, you really have to watch out for those.

Oh yeah, for those of you who haven’t already signed up at freeipods.com already, you might wanna check out this site: getafreeipod.tk – Join a “conga line”, I bet that’s a good way to get your five referrals.

Toogle is pretty cool, it creates ASCII art out of images found with Google’s Image Search engine. Another ‘unique’ type of search engine is TuneTeller, which aspires to be “the google of music”. Worth a look, but I didn’t have much luck with it.

I’m sure that this is nothing new, but I’ve never seen it before… Headbanger cat – Hey, I thought it was pretty funny.

When I was reading Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” I kept thinking to myself how it would make a great movie. Well guess what? They’re making a movie out of it after all… More info here. Hopefully they won’t screw this one up. While on the topic of movies, for all you Kevin Smith fans, there’s a sequel to Clerks coming out… More info on that here.

That’s all I’ve got for now… The first ten people to respond to this post with their e-mail addresses get Gmail invites. And to those of you who asked me for a plug/link, I’ll get around to it next time I have a chance, I’m on my way out for the day now.