The only sad thing about the death of ex-Senator Jesse Helms is that it didn't happen 40 years ago, before the idea to run for public office entered his spongy, bigoted, narrow, inbred, addled, shitlike brain.

I take great joy in his death. If you find that distasteful, you just don't know enough about him. I take great joy in the deaths of everyone like him - that entire breed of drooling idiot dinosaur rapists that have had their way for far too long. That includes every member of the current U.S. administration, by the way. Just in case that wasn't clear.

And if that breed includes you - sayonara, sucker. I will piss on your grave too.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

Now where's my independence?

Way back in the olden days (January of 1995) I signed a fancy looking contract with Mother Road Publications for a book of poems and short stories. It was a long and drawn out birth (as these things usually are in the small press) but finally, in April of 1997, alternative man appeared. It was my first book and I was pretty excited about it. When the first 5 or 10 copies came in the mail I opened one of them and smelled it. "Yeah, that smells like a real book," I thought. Hey, you do weird things when it's yours.

Mother Road Publications put out the late, great ATOM MIND magazine. I had been writing poetry for less than a year when I sent them a stack of my work, and much to my amazement, they took some for publication. A lot of little lit mags took poems, and to me it was just the most strange and incomprehensible thing. "Well, this is easy." Of course, over time I came to realize that those magazines had to fill their pages with something, so it wasn't that big a deal to land a few poems in dozens of them.

But ATOM MIND was a cut above most of the slapped together zine-y mags of the mid 90's. It was large, thick, perfect bound (that means the spine is flat, the pages are not folded and stapled), and most importantly, it had a very small percentage of fat. After the first few batches of work I sent, the publisher, Greg Smith, brought up the idea of doing a book. He was embarrassingly complimentary in his letters to me, and while I couldn't really understand why, I decided not to worry about the "why" and took him up on the offer immediately. Then came the aforementioned contract, a few months of me sending him more and more work, then the long wait for the book to become real.

Oy, get to the meat of the melon already, willya mjp?!

Okay, okay. Well, Greg had a pretty good distributor that got the book to a lot of independent book stores around the country, reviews were starting to come in - the whole thing looked like it was going to go very well.

Then he dropped off the face of the earth.

Our only contact had been through the mail, so I had no idea what happened to him or the press. ATOM MIND disappeared, no answer to letters - nada. Eventually I gave up trying to contact him. In the years since I have moved three times, so I knew there was no way he was going to find me. That was that.

I sold my small stash of 100 or so books through the site and here and there, up until March of 2005 when I shipped the last one out. After that I never thought I'd see any more copies. I figured they were landfill in New Mexico or baking in an abandoned desert storage unit, somewhere out there in the wild Southwest.

But a couple months ago I started to notice an unusual amount of Mother Road stuff popping up on eBay. I contacted the seller a few times but never got a reply. Every couple of weeks I would email again. The auctions kept coming and going, but I wasn't getting a response. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Greg wrote me back.

He had been out of the country (his son was doing the auctions), and he told me the horror story that explained why he disappeared (that's his story to tell, so I won't go into it here). In my messages to him I had been asking if he had any copies of alternative man left. It was obvious from the auctions that he still had access to his inventory, so I held out hope that the answer would be yes (funny, you would think I'd have been happier if he said, "No, sorry, sold them all!"). Anyway, he told me that he did indeed still have copies of alternative man fresh in the box, so I bought a giant stack of them from him, and they arrived on Wednesday.

It's odd to have them here. They are like old, familiar ghosts to me. But they are here, so naturally I am going to sell them to you! Looky here! I used to sell them for a premium, but now that I have fresh stock I will sell them at the cover price, which is $8.95. A small price to pay for a ghost book, I can assure you. If you buy it you can see a picture of what I looked like 15 or so years ago, and ridicule me for my outfit, attitude and writing. Your $8.95 buys you that right. Or you can just ridicule me here for free. Your call.

But if I was you, I'd buy a ghost book. I'll even write my name in it, and scribble a picture that looks like something a troubled second grader would nervously scrawl on a bathroom wall with a crayon!

You can't get shit like that on Amazon, babies!

All hail the Mother Road.

Well, this is pretty cool; youvebeenleftbehind.com.

In a nutshell, this guy - Mark Heard - is running a service that will contact your loved ones for you, via email, after the "rapture."

The rapture, in case you didn't know, is when JESUS comes and takes all the boys and girls who have behaved and eaten their vegetables up to heaven to prance around forever in white robes and watch the rest of us suffer an eternity under the thumb of the beast SATAN (don't know what that means? Imagine you're the guy in Apocalypto who's being chased, only instead of running for a day or two, you have to run forever and the guys who are chasing you keep shooting you with arrows and spears and you're bleeding and stumbling and you can't breathe, and all the time this is happening your wife and kids are drowning in a pit full of wet howler monkeys she had to beat to death with a stick, and you can't get to them to help - I think it's kind of like that - forever).

Now, by Mark's logic, if you can send an email to people after JESUS has taken you away, they will be convinced that you weren't full of crap with all the JESUS talk, and they will then, naturally, pledge their lives to JESUS somehow (I guess you will send them instructions), and be SAVED. There's lots more to it, of course. For all the fascinating details of how it works, you really should go read the site for yourself. It will only take a few minutes. Mark is not the long-winded type.

But first, I have to ask you rapture-ites; what's the deal with this rapture of yours? I mean, first, it happens, right? Everyone who is "chosen" is taken away, ascending a beautiful beam of light and traveling up to the mothership, just like in those UFO movies or 1970's Parliament-Funkadelic concerts, right? Okay, but then how do I follow you up a few days later? Will the beam make a second appearance? Is this rapture open for a certain number of days? If so, how long can I wait? Doesn't a second chance kind of defeat the purpose of believing in the first place? Will these questions be answered in the email?

I want to believe (you could say that I pray) that this is an elaborate hoax. I think it's very funny, hoax or not. And even funnier, I suppose, if a gaggle of glassy-eyed jackasses PayPal this dink $40 for the privilege of uploading their sensitive financial documents to his server. Or rather, to the shared GoDaddy server that his site (and thousands of other sites) lives on. This is actually only another weeding out of the stupid if it's for real, so what the hell.

But it got me thinking about this rapture thing. I always assumed it was biblical in origin, but actually it is not. It was cooked up by shysters in the 1830's. That's right, there's really no part of the bible describing this rapture that the rapture-ites believe they will experience.

Well, let me take that back - there are those who believe that it is indeed there in the new testament, and those who do not believe it is there.

So, bottom line, people who believe that the bible is the unassailable word of GOD can't even agree on what it says. That isn't surprising considering the Rorschach-like "whatever you think it says" vagueness employed throughout the book.

Ah, I do love people who pray to JESUS! I tell you, I can't get enough of them. They're the best show out there.

I just need to start a movement to convince them that JESUS doesn't want them to vote, drive cars or procreate. Once I have that licked, it'll really be paradise on earth. Well, in the U.S. anyway.

Well, Bo Diddley is dead.

This is a guy who literally invented rock and roll, along with Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

I saw him play a couple times back in the day at First Avenue or some other MPLS clubs. He usually toured the same way Berry did; alone - or with one other guy - in a car. They would blow into town, rehearse (or maybe not) with a local pickup band, then just kick ass, get paid, and take off.

Those guys didn't have time to fuck around. "You paying me to sit here? No? Well, then I'll be leaving."

Beautiful.

I have nothing particularly profound or interesting to say about Bo Diddley. Beyond the obvious issue of those pioneers having to bust their asses to catch pennies while dozens of 60's and 70's bands who were basically imitating them became multi-millionaires (there would be no Beatles or Rolling Stones without them, period).

Yeah yeah yeah.

Wow, the smog.net domain is more than 10 years old. To celebrate this monumental occasion, I will show you how much spam a domain gets when it has been around for a decade.

First, I use Google mail for my domain, so I don't mind putting my primary email address, mjp@smog.net, here for all the bots to harvest. Google does a pretty good job of sending the spam to hell, so have at it.

Google clears out your "spam" folder every 30 days, and my spam box at mjp@smog.net usually has about 5000 messages in it. A little more than 150 spam messages a day. Now I can hear all of you out there saying, "Come on you creep, I get more than that every day!" Well, perhaps you do. Anyway, the real eye opener here is not the email address that I use, it's those I don't use.

You may have something available for your domain's email service called a "catch-all" address. The original purpose of a catch-all was to "catch" any typos. Say you send me something at mjo@smog.net or njp@smog.net, back in the day you would occasionally check the catch-all box, and there they are! All of your important, mistyped messages. Now you can reply and say, "Learn to type!"

So yes, the catch-all. They were handy for all sorts of things. For about a year. Then they began to suck. Now they are so far beyond sucking that a lot of web hosts won't even allow you to use them. Why not? Spammers.

Spammers figured out that rather than targeting individual email addresses, it was much easier to target domains, because most domains had a catch-all email box. So now the spammer can append an entire dictionary of names to your domain and send 10,000 messages to whatevername@smog.net! How clever of the spammers!

Well, like it or not, spammers are clever. And most of them never get caught. I met a spammer once, and it is one of the only regrets that I have in my life, really, that I didn't stab him in the throat while I was standing there talking to him. But it was at a wedding, you see, and I didn't want to detract from the happy couple (they are no longer together, and I blame the spammer).

Anyway, all of the preceding fascinating typing is only here to prepare you for a number. See, I activated the catch-all for smog.net and I let Gmail accept all that wonderful spam addressed to everything @smog.net. Once every few months I check in on it to see the obscene number of messages in there. Quarter of a million, four hundred thousand - really ridiculous numbers, considering that is only one month's worth of spam to one domain.

Today I logged in and saw this:

Your eyes do not deceive you! I passed one million spam messages in the past 30 days! Actually, 1,008,651 if you count the spam in the inbox.

I'll leave the math to you, but that is a lot of spam every day. Considering there are 165 million active domains, you have to wonder how much of our precious broadband pipe is used by spammers every day.

If you spent ten seconds reading every one of those spam messages, it would take you more than a year of 8 hour work days to finish the job. Now I understand why China needs 50,000 government workers to read and censor all of the Chinese email traffic.

And you just wasted two of your minutes reading this.

When I was 6 years old I wanted to be in the Beatles. But I didn't have a guitar, and it seemed awfully difficult to actually be in the Beatles, and, maybe most importantly, I was only six years old.

I wanted to be in the Beatles for quite some time, actually. You know, until they broke up and then no one could be in the Beatles, not even really excellent musicians. To fill the void that was left by the dead Beatles, between ages of 10 and 15 I wanted to be in a newer and decidedly more weird and dangerous crop of bands. Bands like Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and KISS.

But I was still far too young to be in these bands. I also lived in St. Paul, and those bands didn't generally hang out in St. Paul much, so my chances of meeting them and striking up a friendship close enough to get me into their bands seemed slim. And I still didn't have a guitar.

Then when I was 16, two really fucked up things happened. I saw the New York Dolls play a live show to a tiny audience (did they ever play to anything but tiny audiences?), and, the first Ramones album came out. I said, "What? Hey, I don't know what to make of all this!" and then someone handed me the Stooges albums and suddenly it didn't matter if I was old enough to be in the Beatles or if Black Sabbath was ever going to sleep over at my place in St. Paul. In fact, it didn't even matter if I could really play music. I could still be a rock and roll star!

As I saw it then, the only thing standing between me and rock stardom was a guitar, so I saved money, stole money, sold things and begged for money on the street until I had enough greenbacks to visit a real music store and get me a real ELECTRIC geetar!

Well, I walked into Torp's on Rice Street just north of downtown St. Paul, and there they were; every guitar bass, drum, keyboard and amp any band could want. I felt intimidated. I didn't have any idea how to play the guitar so trying them out would prove to be troublesome. I also didn't realize that the less than $200 in my pocket wouldn't really buy any name brand shit in there. I came to learn that later, of course, and Torp's pocketed about a third of my income for the next 8 or 9 years.

So I walked up and down the cramped rows between the amplifiers and just thought, "What the fuck? How do I pick one of these, and what the fuck am I going to do with one of these after I pick it out?" Just then Arnie walked up to me. Arnie must have been in his fifties, buzz haircut, pocket protector, and he had one leg shorter than the other that made it necessary for him to wear a giant shoe, just like the guys in KISS, so I figured he couldn't be all bad.

Without the slightest condescension, disdain, ridicule, pity, or anything else he could have felt toward me in my obvious virgin condition, he casually said, "Which one of 'em to you want to play? You really have to play a guitar before you buy it."

Well, I said, since I was standing in front of it, "I really like that red one." "The flying V?" "Yeah, the Flying V." (I had already learned my first rock term. I was well on my way). "Oh, this is a good one," he said. But then he probably said that about every guitar, bass, accordion or other piece of crap in the place. He was right, as it turned out, so maybe he wasn't bullshitting me. But probably he was. He was old school like that.

Arnie pulled it down, laboriously plugged it into some crappy amp and said, "let me get you a strap." A strap? How the hell do you put on a strap? Does it tie around the top part where the end of the strings are? Luckily Arnie connected the strap for me, and then, in the kindest and most understanding gesture of the evening, turned and walked away.

Because, remember, I didn't know how to play the guitar. So had he stood there and watched me I would have probably just shit my pants and ran home. Instead I plucked some stings, tried to put my fingers on the frets like I saw the bands do on TV, and then I unplugged the guitar, which made a huge buzzing sound that you recognize if you've ever just jerked the cable out of a guitar.

Arnie walked back over and took the V from me and hung it back up on the rack. "What else do you want to try?" He asked, but I couldn't take my eyes off the V. "None," I said, "I want that one." So he smiled and brought it up to the counter and I bought it. Somehow, the exact amount of money that I had in my pocket was what it cost! Isn't it amazing when that happens? I think it happened a lot at Torp's.

It was an Electra model - made in Japan (like all the copies of famous guitars were back then) at the Fujigen factory where they made Ibanez and a million other brands of guitars. In their catalog it was called the No. 2236 Flying Wedge. It had a Mahogany body and a really nice wine red transparent finish, so the wood grain really showed through. A beautiful and well-made guitar, because even budget shit was built with pride of craftsmanship back in ye olden dayes!

Anyway, it was the only guitar I had for a long time. I learned to play on it, and with my newfound appreciation of groups like the Ramones, Stooges and the New York Dolls, I was starting to think this rock band stuff was going to be easy. Shit, if they could do it, so could I. My friend Jimmy Wallin played bass and guitar, Roger DeBace and Brad Johnson played guitar, Mark Madden, Steve Nelson and Mike Reiter were all drummers, and John Ohr could howl and yelp and squirm around on the floor just like Iggy. Jesus christ, why didn't everyone have a band? Probably because everyone didn't hang out in the same circles as I did. You know, among the kind of people who could listen to the Stooges Funhouse 15 times a day and actually enjoy it.

Over the next few years I accumulated more guitars; a 1969 Stratocaster (that I ruined - more or less on purpose - during my first live show in front of a paying audience), a Les Paul Deluxe, a few 1950's Les Paul Juniors, even a one-of-a-kind, factory custom made-to-my-specifications Ibanez Iceman (you've never heard of it, but it's a really a stupid looking guitar, trust me.) Yet 90% of the time I found myself playing the cheap Electra copy of the Flying V.

I was a tinkerer though, so I couldn't leave well enough alone. I stripped the beautiful finish off the V (don't remember why), put in new DiMarzio pickups because that's what was advertised in Guitar Player Magazine (A Super Distortion in the bridge position and Super II in the neck position, if you were wondering). I rewired the knobs and switches because I kept hitting the volume knob with my hand (hey, it was punk rock). Put on Grover tuners - pretty much the only things left that were original were the neck and the body, but god damn it man, no other guitar sounded like that fucker. It didn't matter how much I abused it, I couldn't kill it.

Well, almost.

One night we were playing a show in someone's basement (hey, it was still punk rock), and I did a little shtick that I had done a thousand times - balance the V and let it stand up by itself, then let go of it and walk away and let it fall down and make a big ugly racket.

Well that night it made a real ugly racket - the neck snapped as soon as it hit the floor. You have to kind of expect that when you purposely let a guitar fall flat on it's face every day, but still it saddened and angered me. I picked up the headstock which was still attached to the rest of the guitar by shards of wood and string and I swung the whole contraption around over my head, which pretty much made everyone within 20 feet of me run away, but also tore my hand up pretty well. What with the shards of wood and strings and whatnot.

I tried to rip the neck off, but guitar strings are very strong, so it's not an easy task. I solved the problem by yanking off the tailpiece, smashing the busted neck repeatedly against the cinder block wall of the basement, and then picking up the body and throwing it against the front of my classic 2x12 Marshall combo amp twenty or thirty times. I couldn't break the body (god damn Japanese craftsmanship!), but I successfully punctured both of the stock Celestion speakers in the Marshall and effectively put an end to the evening's festivities.

I was bleeding like a motherfucker from several different places on my hands and face (how the face got involved, I really don't know), my best gear was ruined, and oddly enough I didn't even want to get drunk(er). The singer's sister, Karen, kept trying to pour rubbing alcohol on my hands and wrap them up in gauze but I sat on the basement stairs saying, "Take me home. Just take me home. It's only blood. Please drive me home."

I felt like someone very special to me had died that night and everyone was trying to tell me it would be okay, I should just try to forget about it, but I couldn't. I know that if you aren't a real guitar player that sounds like the most idiotic thing you've ever heard, but if you are a real guitar player, you know exactly how I felt.

Karen agreed to drive me home and before leaving the party I grabbed my only unbroken piece of equipment from the floor, an old MXR micro-amp stomp box. A really unsurpassed booster for when you need to be even LOUDER than loud. Which was a lot of the time back then. I put the micro-amp on top of her car while I was waiting for her to unlock the doors (it kind of hurt to hold things at that point), and when we finally got in and started to drive away, it occurred to me that I had left the micro-amp on top of the car. "Shit, pull over," I said. She did, and I got out and looked even though I knew it wouldn't be there, and of course it wasn't. We spotted it a few days later at the side of the road, flat as a Bay City Rollers groupie.

So, life went on without the V. A few days later someone from the party actually brought me the body and said, "Maybe you can put on a neck?" But people had stolen the DiMarzio's, the pots, the switch - even the fucking jack. I kept it for a wile, even painted it some horrible bright yellow color (because it was just so ugly), but could never bring myself to put some shit Strat neck on it or something. It wouldn't have been the same.

- - -

So flash forward twenty eight years. Yeah. I know. Long time. I played professionally in that time, in punk bands using mainly the Les Paul Deluxe and in Reggae bands playing various Les Paul Juniors (and even one of the old, original headless Steinberger's, which was more like a baseball bat than a guitar), but I never forgot the V.

I was recording a solo for a friend on a beautiful Reggae track, but he said he wanted a rougher sound for the solo (I was playing a Junior so I'm not sure what the hell is rougher than that - but anyway...), I immediately thought of the V, and wished I could go grab it and knock out the part. Because even though 10 years had passed since I played it, I knew it would have been perfect.

Anyway, one night a couple of months ago, for some reason I thought, "I wonder if Google will come up with anything for an Electra V..." I had searched and found nothing a few years before and expected the same this time around. And it wasn't much different. Precious little is known about the brand, outside a great Electra fetish site run on the rivercityamps.com domain - those guys have to be the world's largest (only) repository of Electra history.

But it was another link that caught my eye. Writer David Kilpatrick's blog, contained an old entry about being a teenage dude in the 1970's. There he was in his typically dorky 1970's pictures (hey, if you were there you have them too), but then - I could hardly believe my eyes - was a picture of him playing the Electra V. My Electra V. Exactly.

The last line in his blog about the guitar was, "I still have the guitar in its original case. If you know of anyone who wants to buy it, give me an email."

What? The post was from 2005, so I immediately deflated, figuring he'd sold it long ago. But still, I kept going back to that page and reading that sentence over and over - "If you know of anyone who wants to buy it, give me an email."

So I emailed him.

Well, David is a really nice guy and offered to sell me the V at a very fair price, which I immediately agreed to and sent off a check.

Yeah, you read that right. I just sent a check to some guy on the internet who I knew nothing about.

Well, I knew he had that fucking V, and that fact right there made me know that his heart beat in a different way that yours does, but in a familiar and comfortable way to me, and for that reason alone I knew could trust him. I never once worried that I would be robbed. In fact, the shipping came out to a bit more than he anticipated and he covered it for me!

It taught me a valuable lesson, because 12+ years working and playing on the internet has made me distrustful, but sometimes you just have to trust people. If you don't, we are all, as a species, extremely fucked.

So you know how the wait goes when you really really really want something to arrive in the mail or on that damn brown UPS truck. It feels like years, but the guitar arrived (In the original case!) and I immediately disassembled it.

I had vowed to myself that I would only clean it an leave it untouched, but I had to take it apart to really clean it, so what the hell. Took some pictures of the innards to show to the guys on the Electra forum, which actually helped them out.

Anyway, It's here, it's clean, and looking at it hanging in the rack next to my (modern) Junior is a very weird feeling. I am 48 years old, but I feel like I could strap on either one of those fuckers, drop the strap down real low (because that's how you play rock and roll, bitch!), and just blow the ass off some 15 year old Green Day kid. And I probably could, but I won't.

This is their time, and they are welcome to it.

I will always remember David Kilpatrick though, and my good friends at Torp's in St. Paul and how they could have blown my ignorant 15 year old ass right out the door with a few snide comments or simply by ignoring me, but instead treated me like a member of a secret society, and in doing so, gained a customer and a friend for life. And inadvertently (or not) sent me around the country and around the world playing the guitar.

So even if I only pick up the V once a month and play it on the couch, that's okay. We have been reunited, we know each other, we don't need a lot of chit chat. We communicate in a different way.

It's a beautiful time to be a photographer. Just like it's a beautiful time to be in a real band with real non-computerized music, or to be an artist who paints something other than encephalitic pre-teen girls in frilly dresses with dead deer eyes that only appeal to perverted Japanese wankers and U.S. hipsters who would worship dog shit if you told them it was cool to do so.


I say it's a great time because I feel the inevitable pendulum swing away from the dead and dying and back to the living. It may not happen tomorrow or next year, but there are a whole hell of a lot of disenfranchised youths out there who are aching for some truth. One of the ways they are finding their truth is with old music equipment, old artistic technologies, and crappy, less than precise photographic equipment.

I have taken about 30,000 pictures in my life - no exaggeration - I used to carry a camera with me everywhere I went, from the time I was about 15 years old and stole a Canon FTb, which, I can say at this time, kids, please do not steal shit. It's really not cool. And I got my ass kicked really bad for stealing that camera, so I'm living proof that crime doesn't pay.

Of course, ass kicking and all, I hung on to the camera. I went on to steal enough dark room equipment to develop my own black and white film and prints, and for a lot of years I did just that. Amazing friends and family with big old prints that they oohed and aahed over then stuck into drawers. If they could find drawers big enough to fit them.


I used that Canon until I was about 21 or 22 years old, then I traded it for a really big bottle of Jack Daniels and picked up the Minolta HI-MATIC AF2 pictured here. I still have the Minolta, in fact I took some pictures with it a couple of weeks ago. That camera went to a dozen countries with me and just about every U.S. state except Alaska and Hawaii. It's basically a point and shoot camera, but I got some wicked, wicked pictures out of the fucker. Very high quality and very much recommended since you can get them on eBay now for $10 - $20!

Then, dear friends, the dark days came down like putrid Seattle acid grunge rain. After 20 years of relying on the old trusty Minolta, I took out the batteries and put it away in the drawer to make way for the Kodak DX3600 Yes, a digital camera.


At first my joy knew no bounds - "Jesus christ, I can hold this thing above my head and see what's in the frame through the LCD readout on the back!" Yeah, that was great (actually, I still think that's the only worthwhile feature of a digital camera). "Holy shit, I just put a giant memory card in here, I can take 6,395 pictures! Wooooo!" Yeah, yeah. If only the pictures didn't look like flat, dead flowers, run over by every car in a funeral procession, sucked of all life and color.

I can barely put my disappointment with digital photography into words, except to say that I took maybe a few hundred pictures over the course of 6 or 7 years with the digital camera, that's it (and before you say, "Yeah, mjp, that Kodak is a piece of shit, try a real digital camera!" --- I did, I also used Carol's Canon Power Shot G3, which is (was) a pro camera, far from a piece of shit).

So, honestly I kind of gave up on photography. Because really, what is there to photograph anymore?

Well, as it turns out, there is quite a bit left to photograph.

Behold the Holga 120 CFN.

Let me list some of the great features of the Holga for you. You can buy one of these Chinese made masterpieces for $25 - $40, it leaks light, there is vignetting of the prints when you shoot 6x6 (kinda like looking at life through a toilet paper roll), very vague try-to-guess-if-it's-right focusing, and an imprecise and imperfect plastic lens. As if that weren't enough, the flash will go off twice if it is in the mood to do so, and sometimes the back falls off while you're using it!

Sweet jesus, how could you not love a camera like that?

Oh, did I mention that there's a little color wheel that rotates around the onboard flash so you can flash in blue or red or yellow? Come on man. It just doesn't get any cooler than that.

Listen, there are probably a million different 35mm cameras just as clumsy and error prone out there, but the Holga shoots 120 film for honkin' big 6x6 negatives. Oh yeah, kiddies - negatives 4 times the size of a 35mm negative (or is it two time larger - I was never any good at my gozintas...). So you can make big square prints featuring all the aforementioned fuckups and unpredictability.

Long story short, the Holga makes photography fun again. When I shot with expensive cameras, the majority of the pictures sucked. It was like you should only push that shutter button if something important or artistic was happening. I felt like that was a waste (and that I sucked as a photographer, which may be true, but now it doesn't matter anymore). With the Holga it isn't a waste, it's a surprise and sometimes even a miracle.

Beat that.

Have you ever heard of Dean Cameron? I know, neither had I. Then someone pointed me to a site he runs; spamscamscam.com. When I hit the site I was kind of shocked, since the design and layout is lifted - exactly - from a version of datapimp site that was up for about five years.

I'm not sure why I was shocked to see it. Honestly, everyone steals from everyone on the internet, design-wise. I didn't invent tables or green and yellow. The design (such as it was) was simple, but I think that was its strength. It isn't easy to be simple. If you don't believe me, go try to do something simple.

So yeah, I kind of said, "What?!" when I saw that.

But the funny thing is, even the premise of the site is a rip-off of other, better, Nigerian scam-baiting sites, like the classic 419 Eater, and many others.

So it made me wonder - you know, like Robert Plant in Stairway to Heaven - who the fuck is this guy, and why is his name all over his rip-off on top of a rip-off site? So I looked him up and it all became clear.

An ac-tor!

A marginal kind of, "Sure! I'll wash the director's car, and okay I'll also let him polish my balls - if it gets me the part, why not?" sitcom bit part actor (starting with The Facts of Life in 1984 and going downhill from there). Now that doesn't necessarily mean he is desperate, but he seems pretty desperate. Why do I say that? Well, this excerpt from his wikipedia entry for a start:

Since late 1999, has made a living as voice over talent for radio and television commercials, and recently decided to stop auditioning for roles in feature films and television shows, preferring to create projects with respected friends and others outside of the "sinking ship" of the entertainment industry.

Yeah, he decided to stop auditioning because the entire entertainment industry is so corrupt that they don't deserve him! Not because he's now too sad and pathetic to get even bit parts anymore.

If someone other than Dean Cameron wrote that, I'll eat his computer and your computer and all the computers in your local library. Yes, those filthy library computers. I will eat them. That's how sure I am that he has sculpted his own monument to himself on wikipedia. Which is very sad.

So, okay, la dee dah, who gives a shit. Really, when I thought about it today, I didn't. But when I look at the sites side by side there's still something in me that says, "Fuck you and the dainty unicorn you rode in on, Dean Cameron!"

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