Monthly Archives: December 2004

Listen, the snow is falling…

   …oer town,
Listen the snow is falling evrywhere.
Between empire state building
And between trafalgar square.
Listen, the snow is falling oer town.


I'm trying to stay focussed on my “A brief history of BME and reflections on the first ten years” article which is due tomorrow (at 10:04 PM EST if I'm being official), but I wanted to share these pictures of the snow that's been falling here in Toronto. Being that I live in a building managed by the worst landlords I've ever had in my life (eat that, google), right now they've got a crew on the roof (making noise in my apartment) desperately trying to fix the shoddy roofing job they did earlier this fall.

This is totally unrelated, but quoting that Yoko Ono / Galaxie 500 song made me remember how much I love NYC. Strange for a fellow who constantly espouses country living?

BME/Risks and encyclopedia updates

I added a few entries to the encyclopedia today and in the past few days, including a complete re-do with lots of screen caps for A Man Called Horse, Cartilage Swelling, Short Nipple Barbell, Princess Diana, and Short Plug… I also added pictures (or did some editing) on Keloid, Small Nipple Rings, Gum Recession, Cheese-cutter Effect, Embedded Labret, Ear Piercing Stud, Bruising, and Janet Jackson. I'll mention again that almost everything there is based on reader submissions, and I thank those of you who've gone out of your way to help out with images and explanations.

That reminds me, I need some help with Killing Zoe… I can't find my DVD of it and I'm trying to get a good picture of Eric's classic junkie ditch tattoo (the bee stinging him the vein). But if anyone can grab me a decent shot of that it would be appreciated. (Update: thanks perk900!)

Other than that I think I have the complete BME update engine running on this laptop, so once I've completed this week's update cycle, I'll feel a lot more secure about the move to Mexico.

It's not about the CH4 fart power

As much as I like getting email, reading the following messages was not an effective use of my time:

why oh why would you want to do this to your self. you are in need of serious therapy

do you have any other photos of girls taking risk like the one pictured. that is a beautiful photo and a wonderful risk.

i would like you send me photos of the penis cutted off
i need to see the menmber for a study
i need pictures but only the member( the penis) not testicles
only the penis out of the male
thank you

I'm not into porn, but I love Janine L.!
I think her tattoos make her more beautiful.
I have a few tattoos and piercings myself and I just wanted to say, I am willing to buy her vidoes now, just to support her.

pregnancy is normal and natural unlike tattooing or other faggot inspired mutilation

Yesterday I mentioned power generation using homemade windmills and hand-wound alternators. So I think we can generate electricity without too much stress if the central infrastructure decays… but what about our vehicles and so on? Other than the two wheeled obvious, how would we get around?

During WWII (and other times of economic and organizational crisis), oil supply infrastructures were hugely restricted and civilian use was curtailed drastically due to military needs. That wasn't too big a deal for oil giants like the United States, but places like Germany and Australia had to figure out other ways to power their internal combustion engines — enter gasification:


Compost-powered Tracor

In simple terms you put organic fuel (wood, old paper and cardboard, charcoal, coal, old tires, food compost — almost anything) into a sealed contained and “cook it” using external heat to kickstart the process. The gas produced is then fed via a resevoir into an engine just like petrol vapor is normally and the rest of the system works as you would expect it to. However, this gas burns far cleaner than gasoline (it's basically a low-tech hydrogen conversion), and it's basically free. A few pieces of wood (about as much as a single fencepost for example) gives you about 250 km of driving.

Anyway, don't assume that just because a piece of technology can be “home made” or is otherwise low-tech that it's not the best or right way to do something. A good flint (stone) blade is still sharper than the scalpels at BMEshop and your local hospital. Small farms (two to four acres in size) being farmed by hand by one or two people produce more food per acre than a farm using large scale mechanized production. The only difference is that the small farm needs more human workers per acre, which is great if every little farmer owns their own farm, but doesn't fit so well into a mega-farm's low-margin high-volume worldview (sustained by huge machines that don't really farm very well and only become cost-effective when you start ripping apart thousands of acres of fields at a time).

I guess the question is what's more desireable… wealth for all, or excessive wealth for a few?

The Real Ultimate Power

It's not normally the sort of thing I mention here, but I really like the work that I've been seeing on people here from Jon Clue; click the pictures below to jump to the owners' pages where you can see more examples. As you can see in my pictures in the entry below this one, as much as I've got really nice sleeves now, the old tribal work down my side really blows… I think a decade ago when I got it maybe I had an excuse for getting a bad tattoo, but these days there are so many artists doing amazing work that I just don't get the volume of bad tattoos that continue to be produced.

Frank has some nice work by him as well but I don't believe there are pictures on his page.

Anyway, I still think constantly about Project Drop out, Tune in, so I've got all these fantasies about having a big estate down at the bottom of the Baja where artists and fringe engineers can gather and create freely, as long as they help keep the windmills maintained and do their share of help in the garden. For those interested in pura vida, try searching for phrases starting with America's Other…”

That link above will take you to “OtherPower.com”. The picture I've ripped is a home made (even the generator blades are made from trees that fell over near them!) wind turbine that can put out 1.5KW using nothing but so-called junk. They've got ideas and examples for all sorts of other power generation schemes using low-cost low-tech materials and devices. It's refreshing to know that if the bombs start dropping and/or the oil runs out, we just get knocked into the Ozarks, rather than into the stone age.

Getting back to my reality, in my wholly ignorant (as I've not been there yet) mind right now the biggest “problem” in Mexico is a lack of fresh water… but if you build even a simple windmill, you can power a desalination system like this one which outputs 160 gallons of water daily. If you're running it electrically you need 12 volts at 18 amps, which is really very little, and a lot less than a little windmill generates. It only weighs 36 pounds so you could easily just mount it in the windmill, use the excess power to pump up seawater, and then store it at the top of the windmill so the whole thing is gravity driven.

Hopefully no one with a sailboat will pipe up and tell me why I'm wrong about this system… But if I am wrong, do let me know!

New tattoo work

Just (yesterday) did some more filling on the background of my right sleeve. Another session will complete the background fill, and then it's just a once over to finish all the loose ends and it's done, and then on to finish arm number two!

If you look at the ModProm photos you can really see that I've lost a fair chunk of weight over that period… My weight has fluctuated a few times between about 180 and 260, and as a result I've got a lot of scar tissue in places like my upper arms, so the ink is going in slowly…