Heh…

Wednesday, December 3, 2003

This is from the kooky interview I'm doing right now… The entry on the left is written by me and is an old BME/Glossary entry, which would date to I think 1999 or so. The entry on the right is from “The Body Piercing Encyclopedia” (credited to William Rafti), which Unimax* started selling this summer. To me the two entries look a little too similar… can anyone say plagiarism?


EPINEPHRINE (aka ADRENALIN)

Epinephrine is commonly combined with injectible anesthetics due to its vascular constrictive properties. That is, it causes blood vessels to shrink closed. This means first that the anesthetic will last longer (since it is not carried away in the blood), and second, the procedure will bleed less.

It should be noted that because of its vasoconstrictive properties should be avoided in extremities and digits since the small blood vessels can be permanently collapsed. It should be probably also be avoided by those with heart conditions — injecting 5cc's of Xylocaine with Epinephrine into your balls will make you feel like you've just run around the block.

   Epinephrine (Adrenalin)

Epinephrine is commonly combined with injectable anesthetics due to its vascular constrictive properties. That is, it causes blood vessels to shrink closed. This means first that the anesthetic will last longer (since it is not carried away in the blood), and second, the procedure will bleed less.

It should be noted that because of its vasoconstrictive properties should be avoided in extremities and digits since the small blood vessels can be permanently collapsed. It should probably also be avoided by those with heart conditions.

This is only one of dozens and dozens of things I noticed were stolen from BME (including parts where he'd even copied typos!), to say nothing of the material stolen from other sites. I was interviewing Rafti, so I asked him about it.


BME: Why did you steal material from BME?

Rafti: "All mankind is of one author, and is one volume..." -John Donne.

BME: No, I'm serious, why did you steal my articles and say you wrote them?

Rafti: I had permission.

BME: No, you didn't. Why did you steal my articles?

Rafti: With over 6 billion people in the world thinking millions of thoughts each there is probably no thought that you can think that hasn't been thought before by someone else. I'd expect parallels.

BME: Look, you copied WORD FOR WORD. Did you really think I wouldn't notice?

Rafti: No one else has had a problem like this.

Oh.
My.
God.
 Seriously, it's like banging my head against a brick wall.

The full interview will be published probably later this week or on Monday. By the way, before you get too bloodthirsty, my review isn't all bad — I do have some good things to say as well. This is just the one that's driving me bonkers… I can't figure out if Rafti is a total crook, and is stealing stuff on purpose, or if he's a total kook and doesn't even know that he's doing it (and really believes he wrote it all).

Well, it's funny either way.

I probably should call a lawyer, but I'd feel guilty bankrupting this dude if he's really just some pathetic guy who thinks he wrote everything he downloaded. It's kind of sad actually.

* Update: Unimax has suspended sales of this eBook pending confirmation of my allegations.

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News

Monday, December 1, 2003

Not a real news entry… Just two stories I saw while I wait for this site map to build:

  • United Nations Shooting – A security guard failed to check in. When the other guards checked on him, they found him dead from a bullet wound to the head. Other than the obvious there's nothing to indicate it was a suicide (not that I'm suggesting it's anything but, but committing suicide at the UN is a kind of asinine thing to do). Draw your own conclusions I guess as to what comes next.
  • Bush's Drinking Daughter Goes 'Pansy' – I doubt this story is going to stay online long at that URL, so here's the excerpt that I got a kick out of:
    Bush's daughter Barbara was spotted recently having a gay old time at a concert by all-gay punk band Pansy Division. Barbara and friends cozied up in the back room drinking, while out front the band screamed their queer hearts out. The band reportedly dedicated their rabid anti-Bush song, Political Asshole, to the first daughter during the show. Daddy's just got to love that.

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Have you ever wondered why…

Saturday, November 29, 2003

Important stuff for people who might like to be in SAVED down below. Scroll down if you don't want to read my stuff, but just want the goods on being a moviestar and all.

I've got a pretty sweet deal in life, and have no right to complain about anything I suppose… But two really sad things happened to me this year — a lot of crappy stuff happened of course, but most of it doesn't bother me. But two things really make me sad. First, selling my Porsche because I thought I was moving out of the country and knew I couldn't take it with me still gets me really down whenever I think about it.

I know, it's dumb, but I really liked driving that car. Rachel's Touareg is nice and all, but it's really a downer to drive for me. I guess I've just been driving sports cars for so long that they've become part of my identity… I'm not a very good dresser so this doesn't apply to me, but I guess it would be kind of like if you took someone with a really stylish and distinctive look and forced them to wear nothing but sweatpants.

A friend of mine has got my old Carerra in his garage right now awaiting sale… There are some racing teams that have dibs on it, but part of me wants to take it back (but I need the money for more important things). I don't know if you read the story on Ryan's page about his unfortunate encounter this morning which involved him pulling a lifeless corpse out of a crashed car;

We managed to get [the car] up onto its side and smashed out the windshield to try and extract the man ... unfortunately there was no pulse and [judging] by the extent of the head trauma he wasn't alive for very long after flipping over.

For him, the moral of that story “tell your loved ones how you feel every chance you get” (a valid an honorable suggestion). For me it's a little different — I hope that the people I care about know how I feel — for me it's more of a live every day like it's your last sort of thing… Don't put off opportunities, and don't put off the things that make you happy for another day.

Anyway, it just makes me really sad whenever I see a nice car now.

Yeah, whine whine. The other thing that really broke my heart this year was having to give away my supercharged Corvette, which I'd built up from a $3000 junker, for the same reason as the Porsche (but also because I had nowhere to store it)… I just gave it to a friend's father, and I suppose I could ask for it back, but I don't like doing that sort of thing. But wow, I didn't think it would make me feel this deep a sense of loss.

I know the correct answer to all this is, “look you ingrate, you should just be happy you ever had those cars — most people aren't so lucky”, but the fact is that I worked really, really hard to get those cars and I really loved driving them and it was an important part of my life, at least to me.

Which brings me to the other car-lovers on IAM and BME.

There are a lot of you with neat cars (and motorcycles) here… Import racers and musclecars, a few exotics, big trucks, and other projects. If can shoot some footage of yourself and your toys, consider sending it in to me for the SAVED movie (the kookier the better). MiniDV footage is best for me, but I can use anything. Here's some old teaser clips to get you inspired (not that well encoded, sorry):

Those are Teckademics and DTM Power promo clips. I assume that I have “store and foreward” rights on them, but if you like these videos, I imagine you can mail order them via most import racing magazines and sites (or search for keywords like TECKADEMICS on the P2P networks — the Mischief DVDs are awesome if you love illegal street racing as much as I do).

If you want to send in video clips of this sort of thing (or any other unusual and interesting hobbies), you can send them to me at:

Shannon Larratt
POB 1021
Tweed, ON
K0K3J0 Canada

Please be sure to include your contact details, IAM page, and a statement of some sort that you permit me to use the footage. Let me know if you need a bribe as encouragement, be it BME gear, memberships, IAM time for you and friends, whatever…!

Since not everyone reads my page, if you have modified friends (on or off IAM) you think this might apply to, let them know. Thanks!

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Aw crap…

Saturday, November 29, 2003

You know what I hate? Finding out that you forgot to turn your UPS systems back on after the big blackout earlier this year… I had a massive illustrated dictionary of Marquesan tattoo iconography open on my desktop that I just lost thanks to a blackout here. There are usually blackouts about once a week here, but they don't usually last more than about 1/4 second, which is short enough that the transformer in the powersupplies keeps the machines running. This one was a full second.

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My messy desk

Friday, November 28, 2003


Starting from the top right, and rotating counter clockwise… The laser printer is available across all the machines (and most of the drives are shared as well). The first monitor is for my network hub which also acts as my media center, playing DVDs, MP3s, and feeding them through the stereo (under the printer). The next two monitors are from my old main machine which I now use for Photoshop work and general browsing.

After that are two more monitors (you can only see the back of the one LCD) on my portable solution that runs BME and I use for email and software development. The scanner is hooked up to the second machine, and underneath it is the first of three monitors (one TV monitor, two 21″) for the video editing box (ack — that's an eight monitor workspace right now).

Liam's article/interview is up on the main page now. If anyone has any feedback on it in general, please let me know — I'm trying to determine whether there's an interest in BME covering subjects like this or not (related anthropology, art, history, and so on). If there is I'll do more, but if not I'll focus on other areas.

Other than that I've been doing some interesting interview stuff this morning which required me to kick up a new QOD question list (ie. for people who want to do QOD). I'm happy with the current staff, but if you think you have what it takes, drop me a line and I can send you the question list as a “test”. I'd like to add a couple people to the 2004 roster, preferrably female.

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