Tag Archives: Photos

June 25, 2012 · 12:35 pm

Rockabilly

Sparky & Cowboy, c.1962, Danny Lyon

I love me some rockabilly. I grew up with boxes of 45s from the ’50s, my mom’s and my uncle’s,  with everything from silly novelty records like “The Old Philosopher,” rhythm and blues like Fats Domino and the Jive Bombers, to Hank and bluegrass, and the true kings of rock ‘n roll, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. My uncle Paul also ran a few taverns, and when they dumped the hit singles for the latest batch, he’d bring home a trunkful of everything from KISS, Creedence, to ’80s one hit wonders.

On the other hand, I didn’t hear the Beatles until I was in high school, which is perhaps why I don’t buy into the worship. Great band; they changed history, yes. But it was more as a function of marketing, if you ask me. Same with Elvis. Love the guy, especially his early Sun Records work. But they stood on the shoulders of giants, and we must never forget that. Both of them found early success covering the R&B records that few would play, due to fears of mixing the races. They became their own men sometime afterward, when success allowed it.

Her expression inspired a character. c.1963 Danny Lyon

So, it was with great relish that I wrote a story for an upcoming anthology entitled “Hoods, Hot Rods & Hellcats,” that my friend Chad Eagleton is putting together. I dug deep for this one, through old family stories and ’50s hot rod history, World War 2 realities and human frailty. It’s a long one, at least it is before Chad edits it, and I look forward to sharing it. I could title it “birth of a hellcat,” but for now, it’s called “Red Hot,” after this gem by Billy Lee Riley:

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October 9, 2011 · 12:44 am

My Voyage to Italy

I just got back from a short vacation in Italy. The Firecracker and I were visiting friends in Napoli, home of the Camorra crime syndicate and the world’s greatest pizza. We took day trips to Pompeii, Rome and Capri and tried to smuggle home a water buffalo so we could make our own mozzarella di bufala, but customs wouldn’t allow it. We stayed in the suburb of Pozzuoli, where Sophia Loren was born and where St. Paul first arrived in Italy. I haven’t read or seen Gomorrah yet, but we were not robbed, molested or frightened. It’s a nice town with a lot of character and I suggest you visit.

The Blue Grotto, Capri

Vesuvius from Pompei

The prostitutes in Pompei had picture menus.

 Pompei is enormous and daunting and impossible to capture the scale of from the ground. It was amazing, and walking there all day whet the appetite for…

Pizza at Cipster in Pozzuoli.

 Local pizza joint in Pozzuoli run by a guy named Mario, they make a great pizza. I liked the one at Acqua e Farina as well.

Movie poster – a comedy about the “Malavita” or mob life

 Napoli has a reputation of being a rough criminal hell hole but we ran into no trouble. Cars get broken into a lot and the Camorra crime syndicate skims everywhere with a street tax, but you get that in Chicago too. Pozzuoli is where Sophia Loren was born. It has a sulphur smell from a vent of Vesuvius nearby but it was a charming tough locale that I enjoyed… but I didn’t have to drive!

 Random Capri photo. This guy is in a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, he just doesn’t know it yet.

The Green Grotto, Capri

The Love Hole, Capri

Looking down on the peons from Capri

 The Coliseum is amazing and enormous, even when crammed with tourists. We rebuild stadiums every 15 years. This one is 2000 years old and show me a bad seat.

One of the Four Fountains of Rome

The extent of the ruins in the Roman Forums

Detail of the Trevi Fountain. 

 The Trevi fountain at night is a madhouse. We dined at a lovely restaurant called That’s Amore, and despite the name, Italians eat there and the food is excellent. The best mozzarella di bufala of the trip, and I had an excellent linguini with tuna, capers, tomatoes. The pizza in Rome sucks compared to Napoli.

 The Pantheon was retooled by the Catholic church and they hold mass there. One day Athena will strike down the interlopers and Pluto will swallow them in the Underworld.

 The Fabricius bridge was built in A.D. 62 and still stands over the revolting green waters of the Tiber.

Trajan had a little winky.

An attempt at capturing the extent of Pompei

A white dog in Pompei. They are wild but friendly. I let one sniff my hand, pet his bony back and he licked my hand, for the salt I am sure. They look hungry. They manage to funnel thousands of tourists through here and protect things just enough. It is more important to let the world see the past than to protect it. Compared to American sacred sites they do a much better job of making you feel welcome instead of an escaped prisoner.

Italy was fine to travel to. The trains ran on time from Rome. In Pozzuoli, they were like New York in the ’70s, without Snake Plissken to save you. Okay, not that bad, but very old, slow, noisy. The airport was excellent in both Rome and Napoli and takes a big dump on Charles de Gaulle in Paris, where we nearly missed our flight due to their disorder. When the Italians are more organized than you, you have a problem, France. How do you tell when a French airport worker is on strike? They aren’t smoking. The French people are very friendly and helpful, however. My short visit to Paris years ago was delightful, and a smile and a little bon jour (or bon giorno in Italy) gets you a long way.

I can’t wait to go back. I want to visit the north, Venice, and the south, Calabria and Bari where my family came from. But if I don’t, Napoli is close enough. I’ve been to my grandfather’s house in Bray, Ireland. In Italy I would just look at the little town of Acri and wonder where they might have lived.

© 2011 Thomas Pluck

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December 21, 2010 · 1:39 pm

Eclipse

I saw two eclipses recently. One was Twilight: Eclipse, which Firecracker had to see “because she saw the other ones.” I said she was just a glutton for punishment. I saw Scary Movie 3, and had no desire to see the rest. And while I did enjoy Hellraiser, I managed to avoid most of the sequels. You know, fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me you can’t get fooled again.


As expected, the Twilight movie is pretty awful. A vampire whose hair and eyebrows make him look like he’s a twitchy bomb technician, and a shirtless heartthrob who turns into a wolf when he backflips are both fighting over a third supernatural being, a girl born without a personality. I can forgive a lot of stupid if a movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, or has some fun action scenes, but sadly this movie is as serious as cancer and about as fun to watch.



Fact: Vampires are make of petrified wood and can be broken if you’re emo enough when you hit them.


But hey, it’s teen twaddle, meant to teach girls to save their virginity for a weird stalker who wants to alienate her from her friends and family, so what’s the harm.


The real eclipse worth seeing happened last night at 3 AM, and I set my alarm to wake up and see it. The temperature was below freezing, and I went outside to take shaky photos of a blood red moon eclipsed by the earth’s shadow. According to science, this occurring on the winter solstice is truly a sign of the end times, because a black dude is President, and old white people are rising up in a wrinkly, zombie apocalypse. Except shooting them in the brain is illegal, and they can only be stopped with tax breaks for millionaires.

I have a better pic on Firecracker’s camera but I left it at home. Oops. I’ll add it here later. I like this one, it’s all arty, like green Aurora borealis.

© 2010 Tommy Salami

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October 15, 2009 · 7:01 am

Ghost Hunting in the Devil’s Den

When Milky and I went to Gettysburg last month, we visited The Devil’s Den, the site of some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. It was so named after a vicious snake that lived among the piles of rocks known as glacial erratics, large boulders pushed forth by the movement of glaciers. These rocks turned out to be a perfect vantage point for snipers as infantry fought to control Little Top, a hill with a strategic observation point covering much of the battlefield.
The site is best known through a photograph taken after the battle of a Confederate sniper by a makeshift bench rest made from a rock shelf. It is believed to have been posed by the journalists, so we’ll never know if the fallen soldier was a sniper at all. He’s just one of the hundreds of thousands of men who died in one of the bloodiest battles in history.
Here is the same spot today. The rocks have been cemented to dissuade souvenir hunters, though there are plenty of pebbles around the site if you want one.
We decided to visit the site that night after dark, after we missed two ghost tours around town, which seemed kind of lame anyway. I don’t want to pay $9 to walk around and hear stories by candlelight! I want to visit the battlefield, which is open to the public until 10pm. The information desk lady sneered at me with that Pennsyltucky inhospitality when I asked about night tours, so we did it on our own. After a quick dinner at the Appalachian Brewing Company- a pork chop & bacon sandwich to fuel the ghost hunting fires- we drove the Blue Meeny into the dark twisting roads of the Gettysburg battlefield.

That’s the view of the Den from Little Top, where cannon rained grapeshot and canister down on the men charging the hill, tearing them to pieces.
Imagine charging up that hill under fire, with snipers on those rocks behind you. Not a pretty sight. We arrived in darkness, with flashlights. Milky’s the ghost expert. I left the spook summoning to him. When he called upon the spirits to contact us in some way… it began to rain. So the ghosts apparently wanted us to leave, or buy parkas. I got a chuckle out of that. But more interesting, when we left in the sudden downpour, we saw a large black snake crossing the road. A descendant of “The Devil?”
Well, that one wasn’t going to spread his demon seed. He slithered right under my tires and felt like a firehose when I ran him over. I felt bad but I wasn’t going to go check on a wounded snake in the rain. It was probably a rat snake, but it was one of the biggest snakes I’ve seen in the wild. Maybe the rain was a good thing. It didn’t look like a poisonous species, but I could only judge size and color in that brief glimpse. But I wouldn’t want to have stepped on it in the dark!

And that is the nearby Wheat Field, the site of the bloodiest battle of the war, where it was said you could walk across the field on the bodies of the slain and wounded. Men lay for days before they were tended to, as wild hogs rooted through the corpses and fed on living and dead alike. It was one of the most horrifying tales of modern warfare. Even the wheat seems reddish in hue, as if the blood from all those men still steeps in the soil. Sometimes history is scary enough without ghosts. But of course there were no ghosts to be seen. No orbs. I keep my lens clean.

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October 13, 2009 · 9:03 am

Tommy Salami vs. Zee Germans

In Germany I first experienced the joy of the beer garden. A summery outdoor park with picnic tables, where beer and festival food are served, but most importantly the German feeling of gemütlichkeit. It loosely translates as coziness or belonging, and a “leave your troubles at the door” attitude. And I was glad to find this spirit alive and well in Jersey City at Zeppelin Hall, a biergarten in Liberty Harbor. It’s a new development on the waterfront, not far from the Grove Street PATH station and another favorite haunt, the Brownstone Diner & Pancake Factory.

Turkish: No, Tommy. There’s a gun in your trousers. What’s a gun doing in your trousers?
Tommy: It’s for protection.
Turkish: Protection from what? “Zee Germans”?

That wasn’t a gun in my trousers, it was their curry wurst! It was nearly as tasty as the one I had a Curry36 in Berlin. That’s a late-night joint in Germany that serves excellent crinkle cut fries and currywurst. When I carried this foot long monster sausage from the counter, a group of frat boys cheered, “You got the big cock!” So I carried it at waist level. Firecracker was not amused, but she took the picture. The rest of the crowd was much less boisterous, probably because the Saints were kicking a mudhole in the Jets’ ass on the big screens. Instead of a bun, you get some spaetzle and potato salad with your wanger. It’s pretty good. I much preferred the wiener schnitzel that Firecracker ordered. It was a pork chop instead of veal, but nearly as tender and perfectly delicious. The lightly spiced batter was excellent. I’d get that, or a platter including it, next time.
They claim to have 144 taps, but their beer selection doesn’t run that high. There’s some duplication. They have a solid selection of German beers- including Spaten Oktoberfest and other tasty brews like Aventinus, which has a caramel malt flavor, and Belgian beers like Kira white, which was refreshing and light. However, they were missing the perfect beer for a German beer garden in America- High Point Brewing Company’s Ramstein Blonde Weiss. Or better yet, their Oktoberfest Lager, which is currently rated #1 Oktoberfest beer on Beer Advocate. Ramstein Blonde is brewed with Bavarian yeast and hops that they import exclusively, and founder Greg Zaccardi trained in Bavarian breweries before coming home to create this excellent craft beer. So what better suits an American German-style beer garden?
Because I’d love to try one of their beers in the immense $12 pitcher-sized mugs you can get at Zeppelin Hall. They also serve an Imperial pint size, but the big ones got us buzzed with one glass. I believe it’s the biggest beer I’ve had alone- though I shared a 96oz. one at House of Brews last year! The beer hall has an indoors for inclement weather and plenty of seating. It’s kid and small dog friendly, but they have some rules like “no birthday cakes,” which I found puzzling. Firecracker wants to have her birthday there, so I’m going to call and see if they order them for you, or what.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=zeppelin+hall&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=32.38984,43.154297&ie=UTF8&hq=zeppelin+hall&hnear=&ll=40.75506,-74.029999&spn=0.120956,0.168571&z=12&iwloc=A&cid=17531812560944171882&output=embed
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October 6, 2009 · 5:49 pm

Occupation: Mothman

The Mothman Prophecies, to most of us, was a movie from 2001 with Richard Gere. But to Point Pleasant, West Virginia- where the Silver Bridge collapsed in 1967, and two couples were confronted by a beast unknown in one evening on a country road- it is a legend of the unexplained. As fans of the movie- if not Mr. Gere’s acting- and bizarre tales of the supernatural, Milky and I made a long detour from Gettysburg to visit the Mothman Museum (Luckily, Hillbilly Hotdogs was nearby to fuel us).
The Mothman Museum is around the corner from the Mothman statue, tucked on a boulevard that leads to a scenic park and amphitheater overlooking the bridge that replaced the fallen one. The statue itself is very memorable, a shiny steel representation of the beast that reportedly haunted the town in the late ’60s. It has glassy amber eyes that reflect the light, and especially camera flashes, which approximates the “glowing red eyes” that the witnesses described as it chased them through the “TNT area,” a woodsy road near a World War 2 ordnance factory.
The story goes, two young married couples- the Scarberrys and the Mallettes- were driving near that factory when they saw two glowing red lights near it. The lights seemed to be the eyes of a creature “shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back.” It gave chase, and followed their car “at speeds over 100 miles an hour,” until finally it disappeared. The Mothman has been written off as a sandhill crane or barn owl that spooked them, to a paranormal harbinger of disaster that was warning the town of the impending bridge collapse. After the first sighting, others saw it. Whether this was real or mass delusion, I leave you to decide.
The history of the area is undisputed; the Battle of Point Pleasant, where Virginia militia fought off Shawnee and Mingo Indians led by Chief Cornstalk in 1774, killed over 100 men. And in 1967, Forty-six people died in the bridge disaster. In our grief we struggle to find reason. Our brains are pattern recognition machines, seeking order out of chaos. Was there a link between the sightings and the tragedy? John A. Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies claimed there was. John has passed away recently, but the museum has photos of him, and mementos of his research. It’s one of the best museums concerning such a narrow subject that I’ve been to- they have quite a bit to see. Compared to the L.A. County Coroner’s museum, which was a dilapidated office selling t-shirts when I visited, this is the Smithsonian of Mothmaniana.
I haven’t read the book, but I have seen the movie. Starring Richard Gere and directed by Mark Pellington, I found it interesting but not all that compelling. I ought to watch it again. Gere is not one of my favorite actors in his later years, and while the visuals of the film are quite good, the story itself was the same old song and dance when Hollywood gets a great idea from someone else. They dilute the creativity out of it until it’s become dull as dishwater. To reference Roger Ebert, “the human characters are, I believe, based not on facts but on an ancient tradition in horror movies, in which attractive people have unspeakable experiences.” And that’s what’s wrong with the film; it takes the unique creature and the tales of the people who saw it, and moves them to Generica, U.S.A. It’s unfortunate that Laura Linney- who plays a local cop that Gere befriends after his wife is killed in a car accident- and Pellington got saddled with sad sack Gere and the boring, vague script.
The Mothman is barely glimpsed, and the best I can tell is that it is a harbinger of death only seen when people close to you die. One of so many movies where we see between the layers of reality and are faced with things we cannot comprehend, it fails to be as creepy as it should be. If they had studied the classic “weird shit be happenin’!” film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they wouldn’t have started us off with Gere’s wife dying. Why, because you want to believe him. You feel bad for him. How much better would it be if we thought he was a little crazy, and chuckled, and then shat our pants when there were two glowing red eyes on the bridge, and nothing there when he got there? I admire the movie’s restraint in not making this a monster film, but it was almost too ambiguous.
And it’s a damn shame. The movie isn’t terrible, it’s just a bit on the bland side due to its lead and a script that goes for mysterious but delivers apathy. However, the reenactment of the bridge collapse is excellent and terrifying. It really makes you think about how the denizens of Point Pleasant felt when they saw the unthinkable happening on the Ohio river. They still have a friendly town of about five thousand, and the guy running the Mothman Museum chatted us up about the Jersey Devil for a while, and spoke volumes about the mystery of his home town. Much friendlier than Pennsylvania folks, who couldn’t be bothered to tell us where to find Whoopie Pies. West Virginny is on my good list.
So if you’re in the area- perhaps for snowboarding at Snowshoe, or to get some Hillbilly Hotdogs- stop by this friendly town and remember a tragic and mysterious part of American history.

I tried to ride the Mothman subway but my Metrocard wasn’t working.


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September 30, 2009 · 3:27 am

casting my bread upon the Waters


John Waters is one of my favorite people.

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September 22, 2009 · 9:55 am

hot dogs wrapped in bacon

At AFS, where I train in the deadly arts of Bando to use my mighty belly as a hammer to crush my foes, a fellow maniac said my blog made him hungry all the time, and asked: “Are you a chef?” My response? “No, I’m just a fatass!”
But I can cook well. Hot dogs wrapped in bacon isn’t the toughest thing to do, so for the cooking impaired I’ll show you how to make ‘em. I made some for Milky and I when we watched Crank, and two filled us to the gills with delicious. First, wrap your hot dogs in bacon. I considered holding them with toothpicks but the cooking oil would burn them, but if you have small metal skewers they might help hold the bacon on.
Put some canola or grapeseed oil in a deep skillet or pan. I only used 1/2 an inch of oil, and turned the dogs over with tongs. If you have a deep fryer it would be easier, but with patience this will work. Heat the oil on high until it shimmers and a little piece of bacon fat starts to fry in it. Then lower the heat to med-low and CAREFULLY put your hot dogs in. Tongs will help here. A metal spatula will work.

Remember the first rule of cookery: Don’t cook bacon when you’re naked!! It splatters oil all over the place. Like on your balls. Or even your ovaries. It will take a few minutes per side to crisp up the bacon. There’s a lot of moisture in bacon and it will splatter a lot. I have a fryer guard screen to cover the pan.
While your dogs are frying, toast your buns in the toaster and then put cheese on first. It’s much less messy that way, and the bun will melt it some. I use Land O’ Lakes White American cheese, because they put crack in it. That enhances the flavors. Lay out your condiments ahead of time. We had dill relish, crushed pineapple, Zatarain’s Creole mustard, Sriracha Hot Sauce (also known as “the Cock”), Habanero chile sauce, chopped roasted green chiles, Vlasic Stacker sliced pickles, Hormel Chili, Mango Salsa, Tabasco Reserve, Sour Cream, Diced jalapenos, Banana pepper rings, and ketchup. What, no sauerkraut? Nope. I don’t like it with bacon. It gets things all soggy. If you like it, squeeze it out in some paper towels.
To flip the dogs, I used dogs- about 3-4 minutes after they went in, and only the very top of the bacon wasn’t cooked. So it only took another minute or two to crisp up. Deliver them right to the buns, and make your own wacky combinations.
My favorite was diced jalapenos, banana pepper rings, sour cream, mango salsa, crushed pineapple, roasted green chiles, and creole mustard. A bit spicy, but the sour cream & pineapple cools it off. I made a chili-cheese dog with Hormel canned chili, and will never use that again. It’s tasteless and gave me the poops something fierce. There are other canned chilis out there, or make your own. We also regretted the lack of Nathan’s Hot Dog Onions, which A&P did not have. For shame, A&P! Milky called his the Hot Pepper Rollercoaster. We called them all delicious.
For the record, I used Boar’s Head natural casing hot dogs and bacon, gifted from my pal Brian the Meat Man. Fine products that I will use again. The dogs had some good flavor and snap, and the bacon had good smoky flavor. We used Martin’s Potato Hot Dog Buns, soft with a bit of sweet. They toast very well.
We had them with Dogfish Head Punkin Ale, my favorite of the autumn seasonal pumpkin beers. It balances the firm full flavor of a brown ale with real pumpkin pie flavor. I’ve had pumpkinier beers, like Southern Tier, but Punkin Ale is more drinkable, and doesn’t overpower other foods. I also had a Southhampton Alt Bier, which is a decent example of the variety. A little too malty, but the only bottled Alt I’ve had. When Abita Select was an Altbier, it was my favorite, but they aren’t making it any more.

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June 13, 2009 · 7:42 pm

WTF, Harrison Ford?

I knew you did carpentry, just not in Calvin Klein briefs. Looking good though. I think I hear my gay and female readers going “Hand Solo”

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December 3, 2008 · 12:11 am

Chumby gives me an internet chubby

What’s fat and squooshy, makes you laugh, is a sickly beige color, and otherwise spectacularly useless? Not that Frank TV guy, but Chumby! It’s an internet appliance that gets WiFi, has a color LCD touchscreen and accelerometer like an iPhone, so you can play silly games on it, has built-in speakers for streaming internet radio, and lets you install “widgets,” little homebrew applications, directly from a webpage you access by computer.

“Whaaat’s in the boooox?” -Brad Pitt, “Seven”

IBM sent me a free one for taking a class, and they retail for $180-200, depending on the model. They come in white, tan (ahem, “latte”) and black, and run on AC power with a supplied adapter. Since they require a WiFi connection, going mobile doesn’t quite make sense yet, but there’s a 9 volt battery hookup inside reserved for future use; right now it voids the warranty to use it. Oops. It has a headphone jack, two USB ports, and 64MB of built in flash memory, a 3.5″ 320×240 screen, and is open-source hardware- hacking it, writing and installing your own apps, is not only allowed but encouraged. It’s part of a new slew of “ambient internet devices,” for those of us who are both too lazy to go to websites actively, and yet can’t bear to be without our internets.

Chumby, charms (gay), the manual, AC adapter, burlap sacks

There’s no keyboard, but one pops up on the screen when necessary. It’s a pain in the ass, but it works. You need it to set up the WiFi connection when it requires a security key, or to enter mms streams that aren’t already listed. Right now it can receive several music applications, like Shoutcast, Pandora, iheartradio, and Radio Free Chumby, which gets many streams like Jersey’s own WFMU. You can get podcasts, internet video such as the highlights from Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show, Letterman’s Top Ten. I think you can get iTunes but I refuse to use blowJobs’s crap, so I wouldn’t know.

News feed


For music it works great- you just squeeze Chumby- as the control panel button is a switch inside the top part, like a teddy bear that talks- and the menu pops up. You press music, and oodles of choices of available. You can set up a Pandora account with channels from your computer, and then go to it on the Chumby and get customized music all day. Some folks hook up mp3 players using the USB ports, to use the speakers. It has a headphone jack, but the speakers are decent. It will play music in the background as it scrolls through other widgets, if you like.

Nostromo from “Alien” widget, yay nerds

The widgets are the weak point- right now they spend anywhere from 15 seconds to a few minutes per, and it can do stuff like show Facebook status of friends (couldn’t get it to work), or Twitter status of friends (also didn’t work), or scroll through your Photobucket photos (also not working). I got it to show Flickr photos using tags, but I can’t get a lot of the ones requiring authentication to work. Should be simple, but I can’t be bothered troubleshooting something that ought to work out of the box. Thank goodness it was free! It shines when playing stupid internet meme crap like lolcats, or streaming video; local weather, or the hypnotoad, imitating HAL, and other silly stuff. But it has lots of potential as the network grows, and I wouldn’t mind browsing friends’ youtube picks or Dugg! items on it.

Yellow submarine widget… where’s the blue meanies?

It has a rabid fanbase who defend the lack of portability in the chumby forums, but I just don’t get it. For the home? Why not stream from PC to stereo? I guess the laptop-only crowd might not want to run their Macbook all the time. For video stuff chumby doesn’t seem ready yet, but it would be great as a little streaming internet TV for low-res stuff, and as a small digital picture frame. When you don’t have your laptop on. With a rechargeable battery and compatibility with EVDO and 3G broadband cellular USB devices, this would be awesome for internet radio in the car. Or a little squishy TV to plop down anywhere and watch video, play podcasts, and view your Facebook stuff.

Charlie T. Cat puzzled by the LOLcats widget

What’s great about it is that it is extremely configurable, and if it doesn’t die early, a killer app may emerge. I loaded up a channel with widgets, like a Godzilla fighting game, nerd nostalgia like the computer screens from the Nostromo, Flickr streams, weather, news tickers and so on. I let it scroll on the arm of the couch; I can see it giving me an internet fix when I want to close the laptop and read a book, or listen to streaming music without leaving my PC on. The RSS reader may be its salvation; I would like to use Chumby to subscribe to photo streams, small blog feeds (like FAILblog, available as a widget), podcasts and video blogs. Right now I have the TV, am typing on the laptop, and part of me wants to see a scroll through my RSS feeds, friends photos updates and videos on Facebook, and youtube video channels, constantly pecking at me for attention. And another part of me finds that horrifying, like the TVs in “Max Headroom,” where off switches were illegal.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=plyoto-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001BF25CY&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

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