Can it be? Of course, as anyone who knows me could tell you. Thanks to Fark.com, I've learned which circle of Hell I'm headed for like a freight train. Hint: It's a deep one.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

The only one of these I'm puzzled by is my "high" rating for Level 7. I thought my answers pretty much proved me a wuss.

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Since I don't have cable, I'm in debt to Mefi for pointing out the debate hosted by Comedy Central between Governor Bush and President Bush.

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A quote from Rumsfeld or Bush, circa 2003? No, this line was said by Lieutenant General Stanley Maude before the British became the de facto rulers of Iraq for four decades.

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Mac users depend on a handy Web site called VersionTracker to find free software, utilities and updates. But it has never pointed out which among the hundreds of software applicationslisted are, in fact, utterly useless. So thank God for PerversionTracker. Willing to download and open just about anything (slogan: "Oh God it burns"), the fellas who run PerversionTracker find MP3 players without volume controls, text editors that allow one font only and an application that makes every up- and downclick on your mouse sound like a rubber ducky.

My favorite: A software writer desperate for attention wrote up a browser called PT Bruiser 1.0, which takes you to PerversionTracker no matter where you tell it to go.

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I just realized that Jamie Kennedy and Seth Green are two different people. I could have sworn that Seth was Randy Meeks in Scream and that he was the star of Malibu's Most Wanted. That blows my mind.

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Yes folks, the south was hit by an earthquake this morning.

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It's the thrill of the fight!

(Requires Quicktime. Many thanks to midtownmickey and nc03hawk at Phog.net.)

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In this corner: Apple Computer Corp.

Apple today introduced iTunes Music Library, offering songs from all the major labels for 99 cents a pop. Maker of elegant computers and--in an attempt to differentiate itself from competitor Microsoft--an operating system that doesn't crash, Apple's a computer pioneer that's fallen on hard times: Computer sales have been weaker than expected, and its market share continues to dwindle. Still, it makes kickass machines that work easily and well. And it has a loyal flock that believes Steve Jobs' snot tastes like cole slaw.

In the other corner: Worldwide Wanton Banditry

People steal music while they brush their teeth in the morning. They do it while going to bed. While walking down the street. While riding in the bus. It's that easy! You're probably stealing music right now and you don't even know it. For purposes of this test, I used LimeWire, a Mac gnutella peer-to-peer package that's often so unstable I've looked for the Microsoft logo on the box it came in. Still, it's helped me steal many a tune over the years.

The targets? Five fine songs:

• Kim Carnes, "Bette Davis Eyes"


• The Artist, "My Name is Prince"


• Missy Elliott, "Work It"


• Guitar Wolf, "Midnight Violence Rock 'n' Roll"


• Roy Orbison, "Claudette"

I picked this combination for its mix of rock and pop and rap, classic and modern, male and female, literate and fucking stupid. Have you listened to "Bette Davis Eyes" lately? Girlfriend makes no sense. Consider:

She'll take a tumble on you
Roll you like you were dice
Until you come out blue
She's got Bette Davis eyes

Call before you come, I need to shave my chocha
You do or you don't or you will or you won't cha
Go downtown and eat it like a vulcha
See my hips and my tips don't cha
See my ass and my lips don't cha
Lost a few pounds in my whiffs for ya
This the kinda beat that go bha ta ta
Ra ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta

Vulcha. Oh yeah. Actually, I've been thinking about "Bette Davis Eyes" because my pal Blenda recently pointed out that Kim Carnes was covering an old Jackie DeSannon song. "Bullshit," I said. "Bullshit back atcha," he said. Then he sent it to me. Listen to it here. Unreal. Kim Carnes improves songs!

The test was completed last night. To put it mildly, the results rocked my world. Maybe they will yours, too.

Kim Carnes
I figured the first round would be an easy one. Take an old, ubiquitous song whose grooves are well-worn in every skate rink and kakaoke parlor in God's great creation as a basic test. iTunes? Failed, hands down. Couldn't find the song anywhere. Not that there was no Kim Carnes at all. In what can be described only as insult upon injury, I found such classics as "Gypsy Honeymoon," "Still Hold On" and "Crazy in the Night." I'd never heard of them, and neither has anyone else.

Thievery proved up to par. I was grooving down with Kim in less than three minutes.

The Artist
iTunes worked better here. His name is Prince, and after some credit card info and less than a minute of waiting, he was funky on my hard drive. When the song can be found, iTunes can be fun fun fun to use. You can listen to the song, the download is quick, and the quality is assured. After all, it's from the label.

Had a bit of a tougher time on LimeWire. First I had to comb through hundreds of files of Inigo Montoya quotes. Why? Because's he funky. The word "prince" is gonna get a lot of hits on any gnutella client. And a lot of people like "The Princess Bride." Yes, it was funny. Get over it.

Then there was the matter of which version I wanted. Did I want "MNIPAIAF" Parts 1, 2 or 3? I was unclear. I picked part one. About 20 minutes later I checked back and the song was mine. So, some pain, but I got it. I listened to the two back to back and they sounded identical. They were even the same size.

Missy Elliott
Fish in a barrel, this one. Slight edge to iTunes for this ribald little number for its ease and speed of download. In LimeWire, I had to select version after version of the song before I found someone willing to be my accomplice in crime. I found the right one because someone had helpfully labeled it "dirty." That's the one! Still, the process as a whole was faster than that of the Artist, and because lots of people had a copy of the song the download went quickly. Plus, it was free. Edge to iTunes, but only by 0.2.

Guitar Wolf
I listed "Midnight Violence Rock 'n' Roll," but I would have taken any song from my favorite male Japanese punk power trio. iTunes, not surprisingly, disappointed. The big five labels that signed with Apple didn't invite Matador, apparently. Their loss. iTunes gets the goose egg.

So does theft. I pursued a dude who had a Guitar Wolf cover of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." Oooh, one I don't own! But I was Tantalus by the lake. Every time I reached out for the file, it would start to download, then quit. Finally, LimeWire, seeking to join its Microsoft brethren, collapsed. No Guitar Wolf for me.

Roy Orbison
Oddly, a big failure here as well. iTunes offered a meager selection of Roy, mostly multiple copies of "Pretty Woman." I did pause to buy "In Dreams," my favorite Roy Orbison song thanks to David Lynch. But the closest I got to "Claudette" was a Dwight Yoakam cover. Oh well.

By this time I was thoroughly disgusted with LimeWire and switched to Acquisition. It's a more stable program that I have inexplicably had less luck with. It found a few Roy Orbison songs out there. Hellooo, "Pretty Woman." But no Claudette. Lots of hits of someone named Claudette dueting with Wyclef. One axiom of music theft is that hiphop hits will overwhelm all overs. Finally, I found just one, from someone with a dial-up modem. It constantly refused my download. Grrrr.

So the final score?

This tells me neither option works. Stealing music is great, it's free, but we all know there's the hassle. There's also the guilt, unless you're stealing soul from before 1980, in which case the artist likely got nothing thanks to evil contracts. I steal that shit with a vengeance. But neither is ready for prime time. I say getting music off the Internet is still two years away from true viability.

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The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players played at Luther's Blues in Madison a couple of weeks ago. They're a quirky, entertaining band primarily known for their drummer, Rachel. Rachel is nine years old and constantly draws comparisons to Meg White. In my opinion, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players were musical cotton candy: not bad to listen to and entertaining to watch, but nothing really substantial. Indeed, I'd actually forgotten about them until I saw this quote in a review of a McSweeney's reading at UCLA:

Other performances have featured a couple and their 8-year-old daughter playing music and showing slides picked up at flea markets.

As soon as I saw that, I knew the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players were big and a quick search confirmed it. The press that they have received includes a Conan O'Brien appearance in January and an NPR feature in March. Now, having seen the press and heard about their pretensions, I don't know how I feel about the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Part of me thinks that Jason and Tina had a neat little idea to base their songs on the slides of strangers, but part of me is creeped out the knowledge that they would be nowhere near as popular if they didn't have their nine-year old daughter playing drums.

Listening to the family talk about their art and how important that art is to the family almost calls to mind a less dysfunctional Binewski family. In both the Trachtenburg family and the Binewski family, the family is focused almost solely on fulfilling the family patriarch's vision.

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Apple launched its for-pay on-line music service today. I'll play with it tonight to determine whether y'all should throw your PCs away and get Macs or resume stealing. A key test: Will it offer Guitar Wolf?

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The Temple of the Screaming Electron has information on everything you need to know.

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Yes, if that forty-something guy is Larry Eustachy.

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This morning I received the following email:

Would you care to exchange links with out site http://www.geocities.com/star_trek_fansite2003/ ? Our website is a Star Trek related resource, containing categorized links, news, books and community groups. We would like to add you to our resource even if you don't reciprocate the link.

If you don't want to participate in this link exchange just ignore the email and we'll get the message :-)

How could I ignore Trekkies in need? Here you go:

Star Trek resources - Home of the Internet's best Star Trek resources, find out everything you want to know anout (sic) Star Trek.

But as far as I'm concerned, everything you need to know about Star Trek boils down to the following:

• There was this one episode that featured the Mugato, which was basically a dude in a white apesuit with a horn
• Once Uhura in that mini-skirt disappeared, all the shows and movies and such went to shit.

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Can't trust Joshashanah for a second. Seems he's making a move on Nora. I don't know the circumstances, since I'm the cuckold, but I heard somehow that Josh made a move. Nora kissed him. I came running like George F. Will to a fisting competition and slapped Hellx's snout something hard. I reclaimed my wife with a kiss. Then he slapped me! Nora, of course, is playing coy. I think she likes his CD collection better.

Watch out, Josh. In the Sims, I could kick your ass from here to Beloit.

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While an an earlier post of mine looked at the Truce Village of Panmunjom, this post directs you to a NYT Magazine article about the lives of North Koreans who have fled to South Korea. It's a truly interesting article written by Michael Paterniti who also wrote Driving Mr. Albert. Driving Mr. Albert describes Mr. Paterniti's trip across the US with Albert Einstein's brain and its caretaker, Dr. Thomas Harvey. A notable stop on the tour is Lawrence, KS, a former home of Einstein's brain and Dr. Harvey. While there they spend time with William Burroughs and eat at the Village Inn. The book doesn't say whether they had the chicken fried steak breakfast all mushed together with tobasco sauce or not, the only true way to consume chicken fried steak.

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Sixapart recently announced a new product to complement Moveable Type. The new product is called Typepad and it is poised to bring blogging to even more of the masses.

Thanks, Mefi for pointing this out.

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US: Congratulations people of Iraq! After this long and arduous struggle, the war is finally over. Saddam Hussein has been defeated. Come now and celebrate your freedom. Free people are free to live and commit crimes!

Iraqis: Really, we can live anyway we want to?

US: Yes.

Iraqis: Really?

US: No, not really.

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McSweeney's has been speculating what a dialogue between Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn for the DVD version of The Lord of the Rings would be like.

Part I
Part II

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After the six week orgy of basketball news about the tournament, losing Roy and hiring Bill, I very nearly went through withdrawal today when the LJW only had one article about KU basketball, the TCJ only had a story about former KU basketball players and the KC Star didn't have any new stories. Just as I was about to curl up on the floor of my cubicle and go through some serious college basketball withdrawal, I saw this article that staved off the craving for another day.

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Some of you may know that I have some family in England: an aunt and uncle and two cousins, the Murphys of Herstmonceux, E. Sussex. The younger of the two cousins, Christopher, has been in and out of bands for the last 10 years or more, and most recently has signed back up with a group that he's played with before, under a new name: Steadman.

Why do you care? Well, most of you probably don't, but I mention them all here because Steadman is leaving England on May 3 to fly to the States and play some gigs for a month or two. The first month is going to be playing around the NYC area, and they may stay a second month to play some in California (LA? San Francisco? dunno). So if any of you New Yorkers feel like checking them out, Chris says they'll be posting gig dates on the website as soon as they're confirmed. Their sound is a sort of modern Brit-pop, maybe a bit more sophisitcated than average. Chris plays keyboard, in case you're curious.

That's all, you may now return to your regularly scheduled lives.

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Meet Amy Gunderson. A former Brooklyn resident who somehow eked out an existence as an artist's model, Ms. Gunderson was arrested two years ago because she marched in the Mermaid Parade wearing nothing but panties and body paint. She was arrested, thrilling right-wingers, but the unfortunate cops were unaware that being topless is legal in New York State. Yesterday, she won a $10,000 settlement against us taxpayers for false arrest. (Username: Norlos. Password: Norlos.) We don't know how she feels about this, because she has since moved to California to teach skydiving.

There's no way around it: My life isn't nearly this exciting.

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MSN (Microsoft Network):

5 fuck roy williams

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with the weblog? If so, email me at carlos@norlos.com and tell me.

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Bill Self had his first press conference today as head coach of the University of Kansas men's basketball team. Some interesting tidbits:

• "My close friends know this, but Kansas University has always been my dream position, it's just when you lose 18 games in a row as a rookie coach at Oral Roberts University, you don't go around saying I'm going to be coach at Kansas someday."
  
• He told the story about how Larry Brown gave him his start in coaching in 1985-86 after Self hurt his knee at Larry's camp.
  
• Norm Roberts, a great recruiter who was critical in bringing Villanueva to Illinois, is accompanying him to Kansas. He will include an assistant coach with ties to Kansas on his staff and it sounds like it will be Ben Miller. I saw Ben and his wife at Pachamama's last Saturday.
  
• He knows that Kansas fans expect more than winning.
  
• Since jebus4me likes to read about Self, here's a nice article from the Trib. As always: userID=norlos password=norlos
  
• Finally, I'd like to say it sucks for Illinois and their players to lose such a good guy. The irony is that players at Illinois, Kansas and maybe other schools as well lost coaches that they loved and admired because the players at UNC convinced Baddour to fire their coach.
  
• Anybody else find it vaguely ominous that Self is referring to the KU head coach position as a "career ending job"? I mean, Doherty could say the same thing about the UNC position.
  

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Confronted with yet another blank stare, followed by the question "you have art on the web?", I've decided to break down and post a link to my page. I beg your collective forgiveness for my lack of humility. The big, pink 'Gallery' button will take you to thumbnails of my pieces; please note the Lydane-humps and Anderson foreheads on the dwarves.

While you're there, check out Thinman's page as well.

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Well, it's official. Bill Self is going to Lawrence to meet with members of the KU Athletic Board. On a related note, I was lying in bed this morning thinking about how weird it is that Kansas is synonymous with basketball. I mean, how did the word "Kansas" get so closely tied to basketball? I'm sure the Kansa would be surprised, but then again every now and then I think it's weird that I'm from Kansas.

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Sorry folks. We seem to have a pesky script issue preventing you from looking at the comments and searching the archive -- or, in some cases, posting. Thinman isolated the problem down to a "WWW." That's right. Three capital-friggin'-letters. Somewhere in the guts of Norlos.com we've got an instruction steering your browser to "WWW" instead of "www." I'm a-lookin'.

Let's look at this as a learning opportunity. Seems the problem is only a problem if you use that crappy piece of bloatware called Microsoft Internet Explorer. Seems they can add lots of functions you don't need, but still get stymied by a WWW. Please take this opportunity to explore the wonderful world of alternative browsers!

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After spending most of last weekend wandering around Lawrence and noticing how different it is from the Lawrence of my youth, I developed a theory to explain the proliferation of Jackass style stunts. Going home always kind of puts me in a nostalgic mood, but many of the things I did as a kid are gone. Students at St. John's can no longer play on Lawrence's first fire truck, composed of splitery wood and sharp metal edges, in South Park. The park at the corner of 12th and Louisianna, which simply consisted of a Wooden pole that reached fifteen feets into the air but if you fell off the wrong side the drop would be about 25 feet because of the hill, has been replaced by a parking lot for Amini Hall. The wooden fort and ship at Holcomb Park has been replaced by the ubiquitous metal and plastic jungle gym equipment. The 1073 train in Central Park has been encircled by a fence so that kids can no longer climb and explore every bit of the train. The trenches and sewer pipe tunnels are gone from Centennial Park. In essence, all the stuff that bruised and bloodied me as a kid is gone, replaced by "safer" toys. This isn't intended to be an angry old man style rant against improved safety, just a recognition that playing on things that had the possibility to be dangerous taught me important lessons about risk and the fact that even fun things can hurt you. It's a lesson that I'm not sure that kids are getting so much anymore.

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...beef. The national beef council, in a bizarre bid for the hearts and minds of preteen girls, launched Cool 2b Real: a site devoted to all things beefy. You can play Burger Boggle in the games section, or visit Thermy, the quasi-anthromorphic meat thermometer, who'll tell you all you need to know about safe cooking temperatures.

Favotie quote from the Cool 2B Real Message Board: my girl hero is emma goldman who was a strong anarchist, feminist in the late 1890's to early 1900's. she kept it real, even while imprisoned! - Jenna - Age: 15 - From UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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Is there anything the Chinese didn't do first?

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Spring always depresses me. It sucks that the crappiest time of year comes right after the greatest time of year.

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http://www.michaelkelly.fsnet.co.uk/karl.htm

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Don't know if y'all have discovered this on your own or not, but it's worth a quick glance:

http://www.welovetheiraqinformationminister.com

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Indians can't ever get a damn break. I think it's only right to blame Kentucky.

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Norlos.com fell under what appears to be a frontal assault from my Web provider. To make a long story short, the name of my root directory was changed on me. But problem solved.

Somehow, Roy's responsible, I'm sure.

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I had a professor in college named Paul Jess. He taught copy editing. He was fierce. Never call someone feisty, he'd say in a quavering voice, while shaking a finger. That means they're flatulent. The word references a "farty little dog," he'd say. (He's right, too.) Jess was pear-shaped and wore sweater jackets a lot. I never had him in a class, but we knew each other, he'd lecture me when he thought I'd done wrong, and I think he liked me.

I just never knew he was a jokester.

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This is just unbe-effing-lievable. Here's a sentence that is making jaws drop in IT departments around the country:

The former privacy officer of Internet advertising giant DoubleClick will be the Department of Homeland Security's first privacy czar, Bush administration officials said.

For those who don't know, DoubleClick is company that does most of its business in internet advertising. With doubleclick-hosted banner ads used on a great many different web sites on the internet, they specialize in collecting data on web surfers which can be used to target advertising campaigns. They have also been targeted themselves by a long list of lawsuits, and are generally regarded as one of the current evils of the internet by the tech community. I'm not joking, this company is positively loathed.

Between the "faith-based initiatives", the budget/tax cuts/economy issues, Syria (and every other country besides Israel in the Middle East), the possible permanency of and sequels to the "Patriot Act", and utterly insane personnel appointments like this one, it sure seems to me as if the current administration is blowing so much chaff in every direction that they hope we'll all just huddle up in a corner and cry. If someone were to ask me what I don't like about how things are going, I'd be at a complete loss for words because I don't even know where to start.

Well, at least it feels good to rant about something besides the KU basketball program.

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Here are the college coaches on the short list:

• Bill Self
  
• Tom Crean
  
• Mark Few
  
• Mike Brey
  

The eerie similarity of the coaches' pages is appropriate; I think any of them could step in at Kansas and continue our success. The person that I would really like to see at Kansas, however, is Larry Brown. I never thought that I'd say it, but I really think that Brown would be a stabilizing force in the Kansas athletic department. When I was a kid, I thought people called Lawrence 'Larryville' because of him and it's not unheard of for Kansas to rehire a former coach.

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Yesterday my mother was informed that she'd been elected to the Athletics Board. Did Roy leave because he was worried that he might have run into me at an athletics event? I am the person, after all, who so annoyed Kwamie Lassiter at a KU basketball game that he switched seats at halftime.

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At the request of one of the drunken miscreants involved, Norlos.com has deleted real names. Instead, we're using names of current Bush administration officials. Aren't we nice? -- Mr. Guapo, May 1, 2005

Let's entreat TSI! to consider an appropriate punishment for the bobbleheads. While I like Hellx's idea of sending them flaming off the Brooklyn Bridge, I worry our pal TSI! will be considered a terrorist.

Drunken Stunt on Bridge Rattles a Keyed-Up City
The New York Times
By ROBERT F. WORTH
In another time and place, it might have been little more than a drunken stunt.
But when three young men climbed to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge yesterday during the height of the morning rush, they stepped on the frayed nerves of a city on high alert for terrorist attacks.

A jogger spotted the men as they clambered down a staircase inside the steel tower on the bridge's Manhattan side just after 8 a.m., and within minutes dozens of police officers were on the scene, including members of the bomb squad and the Emergency Service Unit. The police arrested the men, and the bridge was closed to all traffic for more than two hours as investigators checked to make sure the men had not left any dangerous packages behind.

The police said the men, two of them visitors from out of town, had been drinking all night at a series of bars and were dangerous only to themselves when they climbed the bridge tower shortly before 7 a.m.

Still, the episode quickly became a kind of acid test for the city's preparedness. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and police officials, who have been urging New Yorkers to report anything unusual or suspicious, said the quick police response proved that the city's stepped-up terrorist alert was working.

“In the end, we did what we were supposed to do,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Operation Atlas has been implemented. It works. We are on top of things.”
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly agreed, but said the three men apparently had no trouble walking through a “suicide gate,” meant to keep people out, before they climbed the tower.

“There are areas that can be penetrated,” Mr. Kelly said. “We're doing everything we reasonably can to protect the city, but you can't guarantee total safety.”

The police identified the three men as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, 26, of Brooklyn; U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of Allston, Mass.; and U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, 29, of West Tisbury, Mass. They were charged with reckless endangerment, a felony; criminal trespass, a misdemeanor; and disorderly conduct, a violation. Mr. Gonzales was also charged with resisting arrest.

Mr. Card said that he had climbed the bridge before and that it was his idea to climb it again, a police official said.

During the long night that preceded their stunt, the cabinet members spent time at Max Fish, Antarctica and Mission, all bars in Lower Manhattan, and an unnamed after-hours club, a police official said.

Bartenders at the three nightspots had no memory of the three cabinet members. But Kevin Barry, a bartender at Antarctica, on Hudson Street, said, “This is the dumbest thing I ever heard, to do something like that in wartime.”

As it happens, Mr. Bloomberg felt the same way. “You shouldn't be going on the Williamsburg Bridge, breaking into some place you shouldn't be, and drinking,” he said. “How stupid can you be?”

Reached by phone at his home in Rhode Island, Mr. Card's father, also named Andrew, said he had not heard from his son since the incident. “All we know is what we hear on TV,” he said.

He said his son has lived in New York for seven years and now works for an importing company after briefly attending New York University and working as a disc jockey.

“It's a crazy thing to do these days,” he said. “You could get shot. He's basically a good kid, but it's a stupid, stupid thing to do.”

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KU students share their views on Roy Williams in the Kansan's Sports Free for All column. Man, I wish we would have had the Free for All section at KU when I was there. I always enjoy reading it.

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Now he's like Larry Brown, but without a National Championship. I hope TSI! is coping well with this disturbing turn. She may be a newbie to the Kansas