StinkFight.com

I joked to the wife tonight that “if I were put under house arrest, I wouldn’t notice.”

Also, my attention span for most things outside my head is very limited. Here’s an example:

Every night before the wife goes to bed, we turn off the phone and put it on the charger. If I’m busy, I’ll ask her to do it. Turning the phone off makes a sound like it’s ringing. But in the 30 seconds it takes her to walk into the other room and turn it off, the creative conversation in my head forgets I asked her to do it, so when I hear the phone ringing sound, I always think someone’s calling.

Yet despite my brain working like this (or perhaps because of it), I am able to do all the damn nifty things I’m able to do creatively.

Debra Jean is not only my wonderful partner in life, she keeps my brains from figuratively leaking out my ears, so I’m free to work.

People keep asking me “Why did you post the WHOLE film on YouTube and Zune Marketplace and Zune.net? Are you Crazy” (on YouTube and Zune Marketplace now, coming to Zune.net the week of November 19th).

Here ya go:
(in no special order)

1. It’s my gift to the world.

2. I’ve gotten what I need to from this film, and then some:

–I MADE it. That was a triumph to actually finish a first film against all odds. And it turned out GOOD.

–The film has inspired many people They write me almost every day and tell me it got them off their ass.

–I’ve traveled the US and Europe with it, and had a blast. Free paid vacation for five months.

–I was able to write “$30 Film School as a result of making it. That seems to make a lot of people happy.

–Also, I make my much of living from that book.

3. I made the film to spread a message, not make money.

4. I think that posting the whole film might actually drive DVD sales, not reduce sales. This is a film people seem to want to enjoy in a room with other people. It’s hard to watch a movie with your friends huddled around a tiny little window on a computer monitor. (Though the ZM download looks pretty damn good full screen).

Hell, I put the DVD out without copy protection and encouraged people to make copies for their friends. Press and word of mouth from that drove sales. And that’s the DVD, not a small screen on a computer. The DVD looks and sounds a lot better.

“DIY or DIE” has sold over 4000 copies, and it’s on NetFlix, Blockbuster, GreenCine and on a lot of other video rental services, as well in some video rental stores.

I think that at this point, people who would dig the film have either already purchased or rented the DVD, or else they’ve not yet heard of the film.

I can’t imagine there are many people saying, “I’ve heard of that film, and really want to see it, but the DVD is EIGHT bucks, I’m gonna put it off.”

5. I want people to know they can show the DVD as a benefit for animal shelters, because I love cats.

6. I like attention.

7. If posting it online cuts DVD sales, I don’t really care. (see numbers 1-6).

(By the way, right after I posted this I got a Google alert that venerable Film Threat magazine has blogged this. It’s even on the front page at the moment.)

–Buy the DVD on Amazon for 8 bucks new.

Debbie Rathaus (Rathaus was MDC’s pad) sent me these scans today. Bomb flyers from 1991, with photos of The Rolling Scabs on them. (One drinking underage in the photo.)

Li’l Mike made these flyers. We used to put up over 1000 flyers for each show. You couldn’t walk down a street without seeing one. Sometimes I’d shimmy up a pole and put one up with wheat paste 20 feet up. Some of those stayed up for years.

Get episode 0053

Thurs, 25 Oct 2007

YUP! IT’S BEEN ONE YEAR TODAY!

EPISODE 55

976-BeckyChat! (3)

Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean have a chat with our special little friend, Becky Haycox. (Part 3 of 4)

Checking out womens’ racks over your wife’s shoulder, sexism, ominsexual people, San Francisco, how to deal with your boyfriend working at a strip club, feminist strippers, couples who like the same pornography, taking your girlfriend on a date to see the strippers, why women like romance in their sex, other ways that women differ from men, why these chicks hate male bashing, sleeping with more than one person without being a slut, how to get rid of a panhandler, why there’s no such thing as spare change, seeing the Sex Pistols in San Antonio on January 8, 1978 at Randy’s Rodeo, Pink Floyd never murdered anyone, Syd Barrett rocks, and how to freak out the youth of today.

Photos of the day here.

Entire episode recorded on location on the street in Ventura, California on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.

Seriously.

Instead of bragging all the time about how cool it is to be a privileged White-boy in Red China, this kid quit teaching English and took a job here in a local barbershop. Why? He wanted to see for himself what the lives of the Chinese people are really like. Bravo! I now step down from my yellowed ivory tower to present:

BEN, a Midwesterner in the middle Kingdom. http://www.benross.net/wordpress/?p=56

He crunches some numbers and makes some interesting comparisons:

Teaching English in China: 919 hours per year (230 work days)
American job: 1936 hours per year (242 work days)
Job in Chinese barbershop: 3542 hours per year (322 work days)

So there you have it. My job in the barbershop requires me to put in almost twice the hours I would put in had I been working in the US and nearly 4 times the amount of hours I would have put in as an English teacher in China, not to mention that it also requires nearly 100 more work days per year as well.
If I were to work at the barbershop for one year, making 600 RMB per month and accounting for the first month going unpaid, my hourly rate would be 1.86 RMB per hour. That comes out to a walloping 24.47 cents per hour.
http://www.benross.net/wordpress/?p=56

HOW OUR NEW FRIDGE WILL PAY FOR ITSELF IN 18 MONTHS

With my new writing gig, we’ve decided to buy a new fridge this month. Nothing fancy, just something black and in the 500-dollar range that will last a long time and use less power.

Our current fridge is 24 years old and so loud we have to unplug it each time we record our podcast or do voiceover, even with our home studio door closed. It runs too cold or not cold enough, no matter how carefully we set the dial. It uses lots of power (and yes, we do vacuum the dust out of the coils). It also pees a bit. This could warp the wooden kitchen floor.

Also, our refrigerator’s compressor motor runs constantly, which is yet another reason to replace this frosty, peeing beast. New fridges have little microchips to switch the motor off when it’s not needed.

The old fridge has done well for itself (I hope the new one will last a quarter-century), but it’s time to buy my first major appliance.

Ahhh…adulthood.

So we were wondering “how long will it take the new one to pay for itself in saved power?” To do this, we had to figure out how much power the old one is currently using.

Ever look at your power meter? It’s that thing somewhere outside your house that has little dials on it. It’s an analog steam punk-looking device that probably hasn’t changed in design in 80 years. They certainly haven’t changed since I was a kid, 40 years ago. They do make digital ones, but most of the meters in use are still the type with the moving dials.

The little vertical clock dials at the top tell you how much power (in kWh or Kilowatt hours, i.e. thousand watts per hour) it’s using over a period of time. The big horizontal silver dial below that measures power being used right NOW.

Every few months, a guy comes by your house, gets bit by your dog, and reads the meter. I wanted to do this on our domicile myself (except for the dog part).

I had to search the term “how to read a power meter” to crack the code. Most of the few results only tell you how to read the top dials. But I found ONE that told me how to read the horizontal silver dial. This is the formula:

Look on the meter for something that says “Kh X.X”, where “X.X” is some number (often 7.2). Plug your numbers into the following formula:
3.6 x Kh factor
—————– = kW
number of seconds

First I went out and looked at the meter in normal operation and familiarized myself with its mysteries. I made a friend. “Hi Mr. Meter, do you mind if I poke at you with my eyes?” He didn’t answer, and I took that as him not minding.

I watched the silver dial happily rotating, wrote down the Kh=x.x number (ours is 7.2) and headed inside.

We unplugged everything in the house. Everything except the gas stove, but we couldn’t easily move it, and all it has on when it’s not cooking is a digital clock.

I went outside. The silver dial appeared dead. No perceptible movement.

I came back inside, plugged in the fridge, waited 20 seconds for the cacophonous motor to kick on, and went outside, cell phone in hand, set to “stopwatch”.

The silver dial has a black mark at one point, so you can tell when it’s gone all the way around. With only the fridge running, the dial took 75.5 seconds to rotate once. By applying the above formula, that works out to 343 watts per hour. Multiplied by 24 hours x 365 days a year, works out to 3004680 watts per year. That means our fridge uses 3004.68 KWH per year. That’s 3 million watt hours a year.

You could just measure with a normal-day level of appliances and lights on, then unplug the fridge and subtract. But we felt more scientific comparing nothing on to only the fridge on than we would have comparing everything on to everything minus fridge.

Just for kicks, we wanted to know what we use in a normal day hanging out in the nest. We left the fridge on, plugged everything back in, and turned on two laptops, a mixer, phantom power on the mixer, powered computer speakers, two digital clocks, the cordless phone, the DVD player (set on “off”, but still using a little power). Total usage: 762 watts.

That means our old fridge eats almost half of all the power we use in a normal late afternoon when a lot things are on. And the fridge is on ALL the time, which means it uses more than half of all the power we consume.

Just for further kicks, we left all the above on and also turned on the TV, which we rarely do while all the other stuff is on, but this put the total up to 836 watts per hour.

The new fridge we just put a down payment on (a brand name-unit, well rated on Consumer Reports, $550 new, $594 with tax and delivery, on sale from a major chain outlet, and it’s Energy Star rated) uses 432 kWh per year, less than one-tenth of our old one.

According to our power bill, we pay 16.6 cents per kWh. This price can change slightly, but it doesn’t change a lot.

So, the old fridge costs $498.77 per year to operate. The new one will cost $71.71 a year to operate. This means that the new fridge will cost $427.06 less per year to run than the old one.

The energy savings will pay for the new fridge in 1.39 years, or about 18 months. AND the new one won’t pee on the floor or rattle loudly in our quiet, lovely little nest.

A couple years ago my gave dad me the deed to two parcels of land in Kenna, New Mexico (Roosevelt County). This land is fairly worthless in a monetary sense. It’s assessed at a total of 1200 bucks. I pay 7 dollars a year tax on it. I’ve never been there.

But the story behind the land is priceless.

The two lots belonged to my deceased great uncle, John Eddy, of Jamestown, New York (where I went to college.) John died in the 60s. He got the land in some oil scam that ended up taking a lot of money from him.

I knew John’s sister, my Aunt Ida, who was sweet and senile when she stayed with us, when she was very very old and I was very very young. I clearly remember her putting envelopes in the freezer, thinking she was mailing letters to her dead brother.

She influenced me in a way. She was often very “spacey” (her words), and made me feel that it was OK to think and say strange things.

Anyway, a company called The Dalies Oil Company sold land and stock to war vets (among others) like my uncle. Then they milked the “investors” for their money in frequent requests for continuing payments to “develop the land and drill for oil.”

My dad also gave me about ten pounds of wonderful papers connected with this land, stock certificates, newspaper clippings, maps, and much of the correspondence between John Eddy and this Los Angeles-based scam company.

Among the papers are hand-typed postcards that the company sent each month to the “investors”, talking about how well the oil search was going, how many feet down they’d drilled, what new equipment they needed to purchase, the frequent snags they ran into, how much more money they needed to complete the important work, and of course, how they were still absolutely positive they were going to make everyone rich.

The notes are so over the top that I doubt any actual drilling was ever done.

I don’t know what I’m ever going to do with the land, and have had no plans for the huge pile of musty documents. I’ve thought about writing a sort of docu-drama movie and using my great uncle’s misfortune at the beginning of the oil boom as a parallel for what’s happening now as the oil starts to run out. But probably not.

My wife and I did write a cartoon script (called “The Plump Buffet”) that will most likely never be produced, that takes place on the land. It’s about a sex cult run by cats.

When I phoned up the Roosevelt County clerk to find out how to transfer the title from my dad to me, she seemed to think it was hilarious that a father in New York was giving this worthless New Mexico land to a son in Los Angles. I think she figured us both for city slickers. I had several calls with her and she always seemed pretty jolly about the whole situation.

I asked her what I’d have to do to build out there. She said, “Well, first you’ll need to scrape the land with a backhoe to get rid of the rattlesnakes.” I asked her what permits I’d need. She laughed and replied, “You don’t need permits. You can do whatever you want out there. If the neighbors don’t like it, they’ll just shoot you.”

The population of Kenna proper is “estimated at less than 25 people.”

(Google satellite image of Kenna)

John Eddy also owned oil-scam land in Valencia county, New Mexico that actually ended being sold for a lot of money to build a mall. Unfortunately, the lazy bank my dad put in charge of paying the taxes defaulted and my family lost that land.

This oil scheme bilked John Eddy out of a lot of money, a few bucks at a time, over a decade.

No oil was ever found. The whole thing reminds me of a Nigerian e-mail scam, but from the 1950s. And John Eddy ended up in a mental hospital.

My brother James pointed out “These people were able to continue this scam, simply because in those pre-commercial airplane days, no one went there to check on it.”

OK….Here’s the really fun part. I got an e-mail the other day from an old friend named John Murphey. Cool cat, we played music together in the Bay Area right before I formed Bomb. He found me after 20 years, while searching info on the H2 digital audio recorder. He plans to get one to use for recording interviews on his job, which just happens to be as a state historian for New Mexico.

John Murphey wrote:

I startled when you mentioned John Eddy; I thought you were related to THE JOHN EDDY, the big-shot cattle baron who once owned half of SE New Mexico. Your life may have been a little different if your great uncle was cattleman, John Eddy. Land/oil scams were big in the 1930-50s. You are actually the second person of our age to tell me they own worthless land in Kenna. Yeah, I’ve been there and helped the community write a history on the sole surviving commercial building - the grand Midway Service Station. An extract of that narrative appears on the State Historian’s web site:

http://www.newmexicohistory.org/filedetails_docs.php?fileID=21168

Do you have the exact coordinates or lat/longs for the land? Does it have an access easement? Can I camp there? Send me the screenplay.
Attached are some pics I took of Kenna’s Hi-Lonesome landscape.

I wrote him back:

I forgot to tell you the best thing in the collection of John Eddy papers that I have. A big fold-out map of the ground plan for Kenna, with lot numbers, and street names like “Oak” and “Elm”. It looks like a map of an existing town, which may be what they were telling people on both coasts as they sold them the dry swampland.

Also, THE John Eddy (rich cattle dude) was no relation, but my dad says my great-grandfather invented the cattle chute, and some neighbor stole the idea under him and patented it.

—-

I have wondered what I’m going to do with the two lots. I registered the domain name TimeShareFromHell.com two years ago, but let it expire this year.

Maybe I’ll just content myself with being a proud member of the landed gentry, keep mailing in my seven dollars a year in tax, and know that when California starts falling into the sea, me and the wife will have a place we can go camp.

—-

So the upshot is that John Murphey asked if the State of New Mexico could have my John Eddy papers. As nifty as the collection is for me to have, I’m probably going to donate it, as it’s a lot more useful in the hands of a state historical society than in a box the back of my closet.

Link to a bunch of photos and scans from the John Eddy file.

(wish I could do this)

We love out little fluffballs, all three of them.

But the two youngest ones seem practically feral at times. I feel like we have raccoons, not cats. They get into EVERYTHING.

I’ve tried to get a photo of them in the sink, licking spoons (which is them at their most raccoon like), but they always run away when I do. But here’s a bunch of pix of the little squits taking over the house as only they can.

We have three cats, but sometimes I feel like we have 12 or 15, because they run from room to room so much that it seems like there’s ALWAYS three cats in EVERY room.

Get the $30 one-use video camera

then hack it to work more than once.

Voilà! You’re a filmmaker for 30 bucks!

(And now, a word from our sponsors. US!)

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HOW TO GET THE DISCOUNT:

GO TO DREAMHOST. SIGN UP. Then enter promo code: DEAN when you sign up and you’ll get your ten dollars off.

I do get a little free time if you enter DEAN

However, I would not endorse a company I didn’t use and love.

(Short MP3 of great little audio commercial we made, with cool music I made. Feel free to use anywhere.)

In response to Stephen Deng, a guy in China, who went on a cool rant here: “…Living on Chinese ROCK! [pt 4 on “Skip Lunch on/in China”]”),

about Stink Fight, my “funny happy blog”, and how Skip Lunch’s posts are in the wrong category, I’ve added a new blog post category on Stink Fight.

It’s called “Super happy fun blog!”

The description is “Goofy shit, or stuff about how things are equal but oddly different with the different peoples of the world.”

ALL GUEST BLOGGERS WITH ACCOUNTS ON STINK FIGHT, PLEASE NOTE NEW CATEGORY, AND FEEL FREE TO USE AS APPROPRIATE. THANKS!

-The Management.