painting: four shades of Keith

click painting to enlarge
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Carson Van Osten's artist kit on Mark Kennedy's blog

Mark Kennedy has just published Carson Van Osten's (a famous Disney comic book artist) "Comic Strip Artist's Kit." Van Osten said artist "I wrote and drew those sketches around 1975 and I'm so tickled to know that people still find them helpful today."

Check out the link above to Kennedy's post and the JPGs Kennedy produced from the originals. Also, in the comments, I see that someone created an optimized PDF file of all the images...these look great.

/jack
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Keelin Curran Turns 50!

Click image to enlarge...

I welcome my best friend, attorney, and wife to the silverback club. . .as Neil Young wrote:

Weve been through some things together

With trunks of memories still to come

We found things to do in stormy weather

Long may you run.

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Internet sex act lands a Florida woman in The Clink

A 39-year-old Dunedin, Florida woman has been arrested and jailed for attempting to cash counterfeit checks. Kathleen Hall says the checks were payment for her custom web cam sex performance.

Hall was arrested in Largo, Florida where, where police say, she attempted to cash two $850 checks.

Hall told police that she met someone online from Nigeria and agreed to perform a sex act on her web cam in return for a payment. The checks arrived in an envelope with a Nigerian post mark. Police say they are counterfeit and Kathleen Hall is in the Pinellas County jail on $15,000 bond.
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Poem: The cover-up

click image to enlarge


When a story is told
Over and over,
It takes on a patina of truth.

Investigations, inquiries,
And blue-ribbon commissions
Burnish the story's verisimilitude.

Denials and refutations
Polish the tale to a fine gloss.
The more vehement the denunciation,

The more likely the story becomes
Because we want to believe.
The stronger the case

Against becomes,
The more heinous
The cover-up appears.

The logical beauty
Of cover-up theories
Is they can never

Actually be refuted,
But snowball
With every new telling.

The absence of facts
Further inflames
The conspiracy theory:

The lack of facts itself
Points to the utter and diabolical
Efficacy of the cover-up.

click image to enlarge

The Clink

Did you ever wonder about the phrase "the clink?" It's an interesting word we sometimes use for jail, prisons, the hoosegow, the big house, the reformatory, and penitentaries. Somehow it feels a little less fraught with the dark implications of prisons. In fact, The Clink was a notoriously dark and brutal prison.

The Clink was a hellhole in Southwark, England from the 12th century until around 1780. I don't know if Shakespeare ever referred to The Clink or not. I'm too lazy to check. Ok, that's a lie. I just did. And this is a little spooky: "In this light Shakespeare emerges surely as a much more interesting and ambiguous figure, for whom concealment was not only part of his art but part, perhaps, of a deliberate pattern in his life too. It is intriguing, for example, that during 25 years of lodging in London, with as many as eight addresses indicated in our sources, he is never picked up in the church attendance lists, even in places where it was compulsory such as the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark where he lived in 1599 and maybe later. " He may not have writtten about it, but he lived there!

The name may have come from a local manor, the Clink Liberty. Or the Clink Liberty may have been named after the prison. Both manor and prison were owned by the various Bishops of Winchester and was sited right next door to the Bishop's residence.

The Clink was originally used to detain Catholic and Protestant heretics. The Clink was burned down during the Gordon Riots of 1780 and was never rebuilt.

No one is sure where the name originally came from. Or how it was handed down as a synonym for prison. More than one person has suggested that its name is an example of onomatopoeia, referring to the sound made by closing the jail cell's doors. The Clink Prison Museum stands on the original site in Clink Street, in Southwark.
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All This Is That Endorsement

Click on the handsome fellas to enlarge (you won't regret it, girls)
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Jack Visits The Grey

Click the photo to enlarge
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The Path to Mickey

The Path to Mickey is a parody of the movie/alleged documentary "The Path to 9/11." This P.O.S. propaganda film blames the 9/11 attacks on Bill Clinton. Mickey Mouse is shown to be the motive force behind the Stalinist pogroms, the Holocaust, and--of course!--the assassination of Jack Kennedy. Click here to watch the parody on YouTube.


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Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Wash.

A church down the road from my house in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood was written up today in Salon. I don't know how many people belong to the church, but it is huge. This is a fascinating article about a fascinating phenomenon. We'd all wondered about this church where you see hundreds of people streaming in every day, carrying bibles (shades of my Baptist days), wearing jeans, beards, and granny dresses.

"Father's Day and Mark Driscoll is blessing babies. A stocky, square-headed figure in a black shirt and jeans, with a leather cord around his thick neck, Driscoll stands against a backdrop of a giant brushed steel cross and a phalanx of electric guitars, praying over the "lovely wives and godly husbands" lined up on the stage of Mars Hill Church. Located in a former warehouse in Seattle's hip Ballard neighborhood, where drive-through espresso joints out-number churches ten to one, Driscoll's megachurch is a sprawling industrial space of corrugated steel, painted charcoal and muted taupe. "

To read Lauren Sandler's story in Salon, click here.
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Ambien awakens persistent vegetative state victims??

Ambien can reanimate people from a vegetative state. Jamais Cascio in today's Boing Boing writes: "The story, in today's Guardian, is just mind-blowing. The common sleeping pill zolpidem, sold in the US under the name Ambien, can reverse serious brain damage and wake up patients in persistent vegetative states!

"In 1999, five years after Louis's accident, she suggested to Sienie that the family's GP, Dr Wally Nel, be asked to prescribe a sedative. Nel prescribed Stilnox, the brand name in South Africa for zolpidem. "I crushed it up and gave it to him in a bottle with a soft drink," Sienie recalls. "He couldn't swallow properly then, but I helped him and sat at his bedside. After about 25 minutes, I heard him making a sound like 'mmm'. He hadn't made a sound for five years.
"Then he turned his head in my direction. I said, 'Louis, can you hear me?' And he said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Say hello, Louis', and he said, 'Hello, mummy.' I couldn't believe it. I just cried and cried." Click here to link to the full story in The Guardian.

Zolpidem seems to work on comatose patients about 60% of the time....trials are beginning in Africa. But get this: the drug companies are not all that excited about it. Why? The patent on Zolpidem has expired (thus the $$$ opportunities are limited)!

I imagine that every person in a vegetative state around the world is about to get a dose! And why do we need clinical trials? These people are brain dead. What do you really have to lose?
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The Band & The Last Waltz

Richard Manuel

When I wrote earlier about my 47 favorite movies, I forgot one. . .Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (which gives Scorsese three on my list).

Robbie Robertson

I have been re-immersing myself in The Band, a band of excellent multi-instrumentalists with great roots songwriting, three outstanding vocalists (Danko, Manuel and Helm), and a great guitarist/songwriter.

The band got their real start backing up Toronto's Ronnie Hawkins (whose cover of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love? is a highlight of the film, along with Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and Dylan's performances). The Hawks left Hawkins, and were Bob Dylan's back up band on that tumultuous tour when he "went electric" in 1965. They backed him up again in the early 70's (where I saw them in Vancouver, British Columbia). The Band went on to sell millions of records, and received massive critical acclaim. An early hit was "The Weight," (also included on the Easy Rider soundtrack. . .one of the earliest rock soundtrack movies).

Garth Hudson

Rolling Stone magazine named them the "Band of the Decade." The Toronto Star's (in their old home town) called them "the seminal American folk-rock troupe of the late 1960s and early 1970s." One critic called them "The Smithsonian of American rock and roll." And the record producer John Simon said "It's simple: The Band changed popular music. It was never the same."

Levon Helm

The restored movie includes surround sound on the DVD releases. Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, Muddy Waters, The Staples, Ringo Starr, Ron Wood, Dr. John, Paul Butterfield and Ronnie Hawkins all came to play and pay tribute at the Band's final concert. This was a band that was indeed far greater than the sum of its (excellent) parts.

Rick Danko

Emmylou Harris said "The Band had always been my idea of a perfect band."

Buy the CDs and DVD if you love rock and roll. If you have Comcast Digital, The Last Waltz is currently appearing as a free on-demand movie.
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