Feral News

I've been both busy and sick for the last few weeks. Here's a roundup of things that've caught my eye since my last post:

Rolling Stone is pretty stingy when it comes to sharing their content online (thus no link nor photos), but in the 13 November issue I found this story: Neil Young has modified his 19-foot-long 1959 Lincoln to run on batteries charged by an ethanol-fueled generator. It purportedly gets the equivalent of 80 miles per gallon, and will be the subject of a Young-filmed documentary entitled Linc-Volt.

Jonathan Goodwin, age 37, known to some as the "Motorhead Messiah" and seen on MTV's Pimp My Ride, executed the conversion. "For the first month, I thought he was Neil Diamond," he said. "To this day, I've never listened to any of his music."

I reported on the craze of sleevefacing a while back, and the website that arose from it; now the best submissions have been collected in print.

From Spin (thanks, Rocky!): A recent craze in music videos involves programming the vintage animatronic Showbiz Pizza house band "Rock Afire Explosion" to sync with currently popular songs. Some of these videos are "official", others not, and they vary in quality of both cinematography and action sync. A good example is found here, another example - not work-friendly - here.

Also in Spin, an article about the phenomenon of cassette tape collectors. Blank tapes are fetching up to $250 on ebay! One guy has amassed 15,000 tapes. Another aficionado, surprised to discover others with the same interest, summed it up nicely: "It's like collecting crumpled receipts and finding out there is a crumpled-receipt-collecting group out there."

Lou Reed - still a dick. The link is to a truncated online version - dig up the paper version for the real deal. (Excerpts follow in comments.)