Wow, what a day! It sucked watching Zanta get taken down by the police in front of our house, but the flight was nice, I talked to tons of cool strangers, and I've got to admit it's wonderful being in New York after a week of high stress problem solving (I guess this is why Jon goes fishing).
Anyway, I'm going to try and quickly make a couple mini posts to various blogs, but after about an hour of walking around trying to find a place that is friendly to both people with latex allergies and vegetarians, we eventually sat down at a noodle house… I hope I don't forget anyone, but it was me, Sean, Shawn, Soozie, Joy, Bumble, Adam, Roger, and Blair. I really hope I didn't forget anyone, but I had a wonderful time and this was just what I needed.
Tomorrow I'm headed out for breakfast with Blair and Saraii convention is at the same time as the NYC tattoo convention, so that's good news too. I always like killing two birds with one stone. Other than that, I hope things are going well at APP (everyone say hi to Rachel if you see her).
Nefarious drew this just before turning three… Art I think is one of her talents because Jon and I both draw with her, and because she's seen painting, she understands the process of building up a drawing. I'm probably as silly as all proud parents, but I think this is really good for someone who'd not even hit three at the time.
It's a guy with a mohawk, messed up teeth, and funny boots.
I think from hanging out with almost totally adults, she has a really funny sense of humor (Jon and Rachel for example are both really sarcastic, and of course I'm just, well, weird)… Here's a conversation that took place while taking her out of her car seat.
Shannon: Hey, Saira, what should we get at the store?
Shannon: Oops, what should we get, Rachel?
Shannon: Oh boy, I'm always getting your name mixed up!
There must be something wrong with my brain.
Nefarious: Yeah, Jon, I'm Ari!
followed by cackling
Heh.
Anyway, off to bed.
OK, IAM is up and running on the NAS and after a long day of fiddling and a couple of days of moving files, Jon (sorry, I'm mostling doing this to test if I broke the FTP functions or not?).
Anyway, sorry for the delays. I'm going to do a little more work trying to fix the broken directories (some users are missing their images; I do not currently know why but I am working on it).
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
I was going to go to bed (and I am) but I just got this interesting email that I wanted to share because I will likely have no memory of receiving it by morning. As you may recall, I used to have a business selling human skulls, specializing in deformities, violent deaths, and graverobbing (in Peru and China mostly). I retired because (obviously) I became increasingly uncomfortable with the ethics of it and was worried about the legal implications of the latter activity.
They still occasionally re-air the TLC show in which I talk about this a little way. Anyway, here's an an example of one of the skulls I sold:
Anyway, according to this email, here's the story behind this skull:
This is quite possible one of several thousand of skulls resulting form the murders of Kongo Müller. A .22 bullet, as that bullet hole apparently is, makes a very round hole at close range. Kongo Müller was an ex-SS war criminal who became an African mercanary. Several thousand of these types of skulls may be found, because he felt that the Africans were inferior to him and thus could be hunted. After wounding them, he would shoot them at point blank and sell the skulls. Few people are ever killed with .22 rifles, so most of those on the small market today are his. If it is of African original you quite possibly have a skull resulting from a serious war crime which has been, to an extent, been repressed.
If I had to guess, I'd still put the strong odds on this being damage during graverobbing, but who knows… I don't have the skull any more so I can't examine it to see for sure.
As far as I know, Ryan is placing the order for the latest sticker set shortly. Below are some of the designs that are in the set. They are to scale, and to put it into context, the round ones are 3.5″ in diameter (so they're bigger than the last set).
Jon has just headed out to pick up a two to six gig more of RAM for the IAM NAS and it'll go in tonight and we'll probably actually start the copy tomorrow… I have quite a lot of work I have to do on IAM thanks to some help from an old friend patching some problems.
