SIMPLEST POSSIBLE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE STAND

 I wanted a stand for my 500gb external hard drive, and I wanted it to be the simplest possible design.  Here it is.  Folds are lightly scored with x-acto knife on the side opposite the direction of the fold.  Tabs have the corners clipped off to make it easier to fit into the slots. Click on image to view full size.

FIFTY FAVORITE BOOKS

A Facebook Friend recently posted a link to David Bowie's list of his 100 favorite books.  I am amazed that anyone can have 100 favorite anything.  I thought I would go through my library and see if I could find 100 favorite books but I could only come up with 50, and that was a bit of a stretch.  Not all of them are favorites because they are good - in fact some are favorites because they are so very bad, crazy or bizarre - but all of them have been or continue to be a significant influence on me in some way.  Many of them are novels which stand out in my mind as superior or unique, to which my mind often returns.  There are other books which have also been great influences but are not now in my library - this is just what I have on hand.  They are presented in the order in which I found them, with no annotation or description, the downy cheek of the best next to the scaly jowl of the worst.

The Avadhuta Gita of Dattatreya

An Autobiography - Mahatma Gandhi

The Androgynous Christ - Edward L. Kessel

Systemantics - John Gall

Optimism One - F. M. Esfandiary

How to Think Straight - Robert H. Thouless

The Greatest Adventure - John Taine

Beast In View - Margaret Millar

The Devil is Dead - R. A. Lafferty

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - Jan Potocki

est: Playing the Game the New Way - Carl Frederick

The Greatest Power in the Universe - U. S. Anderson

A Small Classical Dictionary - E. H. Blakeney 

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

The Enchiridion - Epictetus

Etidorhpa - John Uri Lloyd

Galaxy 666 - Pel Torro

The Clones - P. T. Olemy

Werner Erhard - W. W. Bartley III

Oahspe: A New Bible

Hawkers and Walkers in Early America - Richardson Wright

The Mound Builders - Robert Silverberg

Dictionary of Symbols - Liungman

The Real Rain Man ... Kim Peek - Frank Peek

Neo-Tech Power - Frank R. Wallace

The Omega Seed - Paolo Soleri

The Bathroom - Alexander Kira

Alice in Wonderland etc. - Lewis Carroll

Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon

Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters - Jean Shepherd

Sunset Magazine's New Western Garden Book

Joe Gould's Secret - Joseph Mitchell

The Split Atom: The Last Human Pair on Earth: A Whirling of Ideas - Dr. B. Belove

America Betrayed - Albert D. Nelson

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach

The Plungers and the Peacocks - Dana L. Thomas

The Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andric

Mucusless Diet Healing System - Prof. Arnold Ehret

Enzyme Intelligence: Whence and Whither - Nels Quevli

Kitsch - Gillo Dorfles

Mayhew's London

Cut It Down To One Page, I'm In a Hurry - John Believer

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Mackay

Hard Cash - Charles Reade

Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock

The Book of the SubGenius

Kooks - Donna Kossy

Ritual in the Dark - Colin Wilson

Marjoe - Steven M. Gaines

Dare To Be Great - Rudy Maxa

VEP COMICS #0 NOW AVAILABLE

My collection of crazy animal stories by Victor Pazmino is now available to download as a ZIP file or as a CBZ file. It is also available for download from the Digital Comic Museum, but you may need to sign in to be able to access it.  I find I have misspelled Guayaquil, in the biographical information, for which I apologize but I am not going to go back and fix it now.  I will just have to look like an ignoramus. This is the kind of thing it is and I think you will find it is some pretty nutty stuff:

VEP Comics

Here is a little project I am working on.  I fell instantly in love with the wild bright style of cartoonist Victor Pazmino, and am working up a pseudocomic collecting some of his wacky animal stories from such comics as Hi-Jinx, Ha Ha and Giggle which are available online.  This is the cover I have adapted from Happy Comics #13:

STRUCTURE SYNTH BASICS - HOW TO USE YOUR BRAIN

I enjoy fiddling with Structure Synth as a mental exercise.  I noticed in some of the examples a certain lack of elegance, and in the course of figuring out how things work I decided to clean up something I thought was executed in a shockingly crude way - building a hollow box. 

Here is the script, showing how to do the same thing in a more elegant way.  This can be applied to almost anything in life.  You can hammer away at it or you can stop and think.

// Two ways to build a hollow box:

// 1: brute force - define and locate

// each member

rule frame {

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x 5 z 5 } box

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x 5 z -5 } box

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x -5 z 5 } box

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x -5 z -5 } box

{ s 1 0.1 0.1 y 5 z 5 } box

{ s 1 0.1 0.1 y 5 z -5 } box

{ s 1 0.1 0.1 y -5 z 5 } box

{ s 1 0.1 0.1 y -5 z -5 } box

{ s 0.1 0.1 1 y 5 x 5 } box

{ s 0.1 0.1 1 y 5 x -5 } box

{ s 0.1 0.1 1 y -5 x 5 } box

{ s 0.1 0.1 1 y -5 x -5 } box

}

{ y 2 } frame

// 2: Use the program:

// create two frame members

rule mem {

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x 5 z 5 } box

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x -5 z 5 } box

}

// make them into a square

rule sq
{

mem

{ rz 90 } mem

}

// make two squares and two sets

//of frame members into a hollow box

rule frame2
{

sq

{ z 1 } sq

{ rx 90 y 1} mem

{ rx -90 y -1} mem

}

// Here they are in a row.

mem

{x 2 } sq

{ x 4 } frame2

ONE UP ON IMDB

Maybe you are old enough, or have watched enough old TV shows, to know who Gale Gordon was.  He was best known for his roles as eternally flustered and flabbergasted authority figures opposite Lucille Ball on The Lucy Show and Eve Arden on Our Miss Brooks.  He also played Dennis the Menace's foil Mister Wilson for the final two seasons of the show, and had recurring roles in Make Room for Daddy and a number of other programs.  During the '30s and '40s he worked primarily in radio drama which is unfortunately not as definitively chronicled as video.  IMDb lists his first film appearance as an uncredited role as radio announce in the 1933 comedy Elmer the Great.  Yet here he is in a momentary appearance with Rochelle Hudson in Is My Face Red? (1932).  I may not be the first person to notice this but I am the first to make a big deal about what a hot-shot he is for doing so.  Take that, Internet Movie Database, you don't know everything.

STRUCTURE SYNTH BASICS 2

Here is a very simple thing that took me a while to figure out.  It makes a difference what order things are in, in a single set of brackets.  The script on the left changes the  size, then rotates it.  The one on the right rotates it and then changes the size. If I understand it correctly, it seems to apply changes in brackets from right to left. 

The complete script for this image (without the text, which I added in Gimp ) is:

{ rz 45 s 1 0.2 1 } box

 { x 2 s 1 0.2 1 rz 45 } box