My Manta Montage is running a 5 speed Porsche transmission, but while the transmission is in decent shape, it's basically impossible to get it to shift. As you can see below, like most standards, shifting is controlled by a rod that rotates (which corresponds to pushing the shift lever left and right) and goes in and out (which correspons to pushing the shift lever forward and backward).
So Tommy Thompson , former Health Secretary under President Bush, is pushing a plan to put ID chips in US citizens, and Bush has committed $125 million in the 2006 budget for pilot programs. John Procter of VeriSign, the company working with Thompson and the President on the program says, “virtually everyone could benefit from having a chip inserted,” and points out that in addition to the chip's benefits as ID for medical purposes, it can be used to secure financial transactions.
I've written before about how there is a disturbing undercurrent of Christian neo-cons that have the hubris to think that they could play a role in bringing about the rapture (more, more). The theory they have is that by “forcing” the events in Revelations to play out, they can hasten the second coming of Jesus. Sadly, I kid you not. Keep the above in mind when you read Revelations 13:16-17:
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Anyway… I was briefly at the beach today. When I got there a wirey looking kid, maybe 25 or so, was sitting at one of the bars and shouted out that he liked my tattoos, and started rolling up his sleeve to show me a small patch on his shoulder. “I was in the Marines,” he told me.
“Must be nice to be down here in Mexico instead of over in Iraq,” I replied.
“I killed six hundred and thirty six people over there. Got shot nine times and was legally dead for twenty two minutes.”
“That seems like a lot.”
“It sure is nice to hear people speaking English again,” he tells me. “I'm in the Secret Service these days — I shouldn't be telling you this, but do you want to see something cool?”
“Sure,” I say, as he pulls out his wallet and opens it a little. I can see inside it there's a large stack of hand laminated cards of some sort. He pulls one out. It's some kind of homemade ID with his picture on it and some writing. He flips it over and in big block letters it says something like “BRITISH MI-6 AGENT” — it becomes clear that he's either kidding or a crazy person. He looks at me as if I should be extremely impressed, and I'm not really sure how to reply, but he changes the subject anyway.
“So, do you do tattoos?”
“No, but I run an online tattoo magazine.”
He asks for the URL, and I give it to him, and then head off to sit by the water. Maybe he's even reading this note right now? If you are, drop me an email and tell me your real story.
I wanted to share a few photos of a friend of mine from Venice, Italy, that does facial saline injections. There are more (and bigger) pictures in today's BME/extreme update, but here are a couple each of him injecting 20cc of saline into both his tongue and his lips.
So there are now a few dedicated tattoo and body art blogs for people to read. Most obviouisly there's our own FREE's high brow site, needled: tattoo couture, and the A&E sponsored (to promote their TV show of the same name) INKEDblog. There are some older blogs as well like the now seemingly defunct InKeys, as well as a couple dozen bot-managed spamblogs, and I'm sure more to come (and I guess my Zentastic blog, but that's got a broader subject range).
I've been thinking about adding one or two dedicated blogs to BME, one that will basically replace the current newsfeed that we've been running since 2002 with a more robust blog-based format, and a second “modblog” featuring personal stories and mini-featurettes (like the picture below, but with a little two paragraph interview accompanying it)… Or maybe they should be in the same index?
One of the problems that high quality piercings studios have is cost of jewelry. You can do piercings with junk jewelry that costs a dollar or less, or you can do piercings with high quality jewelry that can cost literally ten times as much, which can easily come to hundreds of dollars of “lost” profit (in terms of competitiveness) weekly. Many a quality studio has died an untimely death because the market is saturated with shops that don't care enough about their customers to use quality product, and sadly, most customers don't know any better until it's too late.
Allen has a version of the following poster hangnig in his Dallas-based Obscurities, and I thought it might make for a nice shirt. Or is it too “piercing nerdy”? Either way, I know I like the Soviet propaganda font!
Update: If you'd like to download a high resolution version of this image, click here for a 300 DPI GIF file. You have my permission to modify it for use in your studio if you'd like, and if you want to edit the text, the font I used is called “Kremlin” and you can download it here (among other places).
