Little Content, No Style

Apologies for the state of SparkBox.

While the dearth of content is solely the result of my laziness, the lack of any sort of design is the fault of Comcast.

They're in the process of increasing the server space allotments for subscribers—from 25 MB per account to 1 GB per. In the meantime, they've somehow thrown a spanner in the works and all the images that I have hosted there, which should display elsewhere, don't.

Had a couple confabs with a good guy named Eric at a local (York, PA) Comcast Call Center (he even called me back!). They've had some other complaints, so they know there's a problem and will be working to fix it. Considering my laziness, I'm not going to move all my images to another server while I wait this out. Also considering my luck, 5 minutes after I'd get done copying the images and updating the links, Comcast would have the problem fixed.

In the immortal words of Kilgore Trout (and Linda Ellerbee): "So it goes."

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Time Warp Coin

(Click Image to Enlarge)      Last week I stopped at the local con-
venience store and got a small fountain Coke. 79¢ + 6% sales tax = 84¢. 16¢ change from my dollar. I was in kind of a hurry so I just grabbed the change and shoved it in my pocket without even looking.

Yesterday, I was gathering up my clothes to do laundry and the pair of shorts I had worn to the store decided to divest itself of the change I had shoved in the pocket. As I was picking up the coins i noticed there was something different about the "penny."

It looked like a badly tarnished one-cent piece, but, hmm...what's this? The edge of the coin was flute-milled, like a dime. I shoved my glasses up on my forehead and looked a little closer. This wasn't like any coin I had ever seen.

Sooo, I took it to the sink and tried to clean it off—first with some dish liquid, then with Barkeeper's Friend. It got a little cleaner, but no brighter. Then I tried Tarn-X and then jewelry cleaner, then vinegar and baking soda. Not much luck with them, either.

But, it got cleaned up enough to see what it is: A badly worn 5 pfennig piece, dated 1944, minted in Nazi Germany. Never saw one before, or even knew about them.

According to this Wikipedia article, they are made of a zinc-aluminum alloy. 1944 was the last year for coins bearing a swastika, for obvious reasons.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, since it's too beat up to be worth much of anything. I suppose it'll just end up forgotten in a drawer or a box, forgotten like so much other weird junk we all collect over the years. Full Story & Permalink

Murray Roman - Forgotten Hippie Comic

Thought you might enjoy this exhaustively researched article from WFMU's Beware of the Blog about a long-forgotten hippie-stoner-era comic named Murray Roman (short career synopsis at Wikipedia).

Author Kliph Nesteroff (MySpace page) builds an extraordinary tree of branching connections between Roman and the whole stable of writers from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Super Dave Osborne, Rob Reiner, Mason "Classical Gas" Williams, The Doors, The Baja Marimba Band, Ren & Stimpy, Mad Magazine records, The Monkees, "That Girl!" and on and on and on, are amazing.

The full album that is referenced to start the article is available as an mp3—just look for the link— and is unique in the way it's produced, segueing as it does between comedy bits, music and some psychedelic sound effects. The comedy is kind of dated, but I've never heard anything like this production.

This is one for the iPod!

Thanks for the great article, Kliph!

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/10/the-forgotten-m.html

Update:
In an article entitled "Murray Roman: Reflections of his Contemporaries - Pt. 1 and posted on Sunday 4 November 2007, author Kliph Nesteroff says:

"The Forgotten Murray Roman was the name of an article I posted a few weeks ago about a counterculture stand-up comic who is none-too-famous today. I have since removed that article with plans to repost it sometime soon, as I have since had the chance to speak with several people who knew and worked with Murray. Their insights have changed the shape of the article dramatically. Perhaps the one living person who can tell us the most about Murray Roman is the man who hired him as a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Tom Smothers. Here is the transcript of a conversation I had with Tom a few days ago."

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