Jack
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Everything you know is wrong
Male
51 years old
Sunnyvale, California
United States
Last Login: 9/28/2009
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Mood:
contemplative
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Jack's Interests
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| Music | The Blues. And in case anyone is unclear on this: Eric Clapton is a bluesman the same way that Wonder Bread is bread. And Stevie Ray Vaughn was a passable guitarist who died tragically while still young. Jimi Hendrix was Jimi Hendrix. Try not to confuse the two, please. And of course (almost forgot!) - Don Henley Must Die.
Guess I've kinda blurred the distinction that was here before I updated this (no info at all is pretty clear, right?), so if you need to ask what the Blues is, Alligator Records won't steer you wrong:
Rock and roll (the real stuff, none of that headbanger bullshit like Metallica (especially not Metallica, because Lars is such a punk-ass shill for all the other mediocre hacks, and NO EMO! I mean it! That stuff makes me puke! And that goes double for Bono and his talentless bandmates, particularly Mr. and Mrs. Edge's overrated brat,"The".). It had better have a beat I can dance to, or I'm outa there...
Funk - George Clinton & P-Funk.
Older rap - NWA, Tupac, Too Short (heh), No Eminem. Fuck Eminem and the horse he rode in on.
Real country - Hank Williams, Johnny Cash,.. None of that big-hat-wearing, jingoistic-flag-waving, steel guitars and fake-ass twang "young country" offal; make Lars and Eminem listen to that.
Louis Armstrong, Dixieland, Big Band Swing...
Shelley Doty
or right here on MySpace
Here Are The Facts You Requested
The Grateful Dead
Filesharing is good.
Keep your copyright nonsense, your iTunes, and that idiot Steve Jobs away from me. | | Movies | Used Cars - gotta love a film that contains the line: "$17,000? Why that's too fucking high!"
Kelly's Heroes - second best Clint Eastwood film, after, of course...
The Outlaw Josie Wales: "We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the United States." That line rocks (I borrowed IMDB's version except for "Union". And I don't care if I'm wrong; that's the one part I remember, so that's the quote, dammit), and so does Chief Dan George, who delivered it. Yes, I know he died 24 years ago; he still rocks.
Duel. Absolutely the greatest made-for-TV film, ever. Steven Spielberg's first and best - only film of his that doesn't suck. Makes me wonder what happened, Almost makes up for "Shaving Ryan's Privates" or whatever that moronathon was called... Almost. If that sappy piece of crap had ended after the first 20 minutes, I might suspect that "Duel" wasn't just a fluke cause by no budget and heavy drug use, or something.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Even made good use of John Lithgow's, um,.. (what's the opposite of "subtle and nuanced"? - "Post-Hoo-ah!-Pacino-esque", maybe?) "acting" "style".
Serenity - not as good as the TV show, but hell, what is? Attention George Lucas: See? Science Fiction can include a story along with the special effects, you hack. At least Spielberg made onegood film. What've you got? "THX-1138"? My God, that's pitiful... | | Television | That's the big square thing that takes up a bunch of space in the middle of my bookshelf, right? Yeah, I kinda remember that... I used to watched Simpsons reruns on it until they moved them around so much on the scheule thatI lost track; now I can't even seem to get Channel 44 to come in at all, so... I dunno.
The Spanish lanquage channels were pretty cool until they decided to replace the movies they used to run (low-budget pulp with just the basics: dramas where everybody dies, and comedies where they don't, supplemented with way more T&A than lukewarm dreck like "Desperate Housewives" could ever hint at [Note: I have not actually seen even one episode of what may, in fact, be a wonderful, heartwarming, intelligent, non-lukewarm, minimally dreck-like, artistic, yet gritty portrait of housewives desperate for much more fulfilling than mere ratings and advertising loot, wantonly displaying even more tits than, and at least as many asses as, say, the average Argentine crime drama. But I'm willing to take the chance that its dreck-like nature is abundantly evident, and its temperature is tepid. Honestly, though: the show is on fucking network TV. I'm pretty sure I'm not needlessly maligning it, unless TV shows are entirely different from the way they always were, and had been - until maybe two years ago, when I finally gave up on the whole mess: Comcast provided the final straw, but cable and TV in general just don't do it for me any more. It's sorta like growing tired ot pot; you can't and won't believe it's possible until it happens. Trust me, young bake-head, this too shall come to pass....], before they began replacing them with dubbed, mediocre Hollywood (a tautology if ever was) films only slightly improved by the fact that I don't speak or understand Spanish beyond what I've picked up though osmosis by living in California. The dubbed soundtrack can sometimes make even Guvinuh Ahnuld sound nearly sentient; I can't understand any of what he's saying rather than the half or so that I usually do. "Calleefohnia's" pain is the movie-going publc's gain; don't say we've never taken one for the team, folks (maybe it's karmic payback for those snotty "Welcome to California. Now go home." bumper stickers that were always so popular among last year's arrivals).
Where was I? Oh yeah. TV. Right. Supposedly, Philo T. Farnsworth actually invented it, even though the credit went to some corporate stiff with nowhere near as colorul-sounding a name (David Sarnoff, if memory serves...). And WRGB (the call letters were chosen to honor a guy named W. R. G. Baker, who apparently had an extra middle name, like the asshole who first portrayed a vicious, murderous, halfwit known as "President Bush" (Why anyone wanted a sequel to that first one is as mystifying to me as that six-part Star Wars, uh, "hexology" or whatever the hell...), in Schenectady (once known as "The City that Lights (General Electric) and hauls (ALCO - the late American Locomotive Company) the world, rather than "that place with the funny-sounding name that's a bitch to spell correctly."), New York, supposedly made the first "real" TV broadcast, unless someone else did it somewhere else, first. Anyway, without that historic event, whereever and whenever it actually happened, a bunch of people would probably make a lot less money than they do now, and I could probably fit a lot more books on my damned bookshelf. | | Books | Anything by Neal Stephenson, Matt Ruff, or Donald E, Westlake. Most stuff by William Gibson (not "with Bruce Sterling", though. *Bleah*), "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly, "BeBop to the Boolean Boogie" by Clive (call me "Max") Maxfield. "American Steel" and "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston (gotta find some of the other stuff he's written). Heinlein, particularly "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". John Varley's various opi ("Titan" trilogy, "Steel Beach", "The Golden Globe", etc.). "Children of the Arbat", "Fear", and "Dust and Ashes" by Anatoli Rybakov (depressingly Russian, set in a particularly depressing time; still worth reading. Pretty darned depressing, though). Copi's "Introduction to Logic". Non-fiction/history by John Toland. |
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A group for people who never join groups
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Jack's Details
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| Status: | Divorced | | Here for: | Networking, Friends | | Orientation: | Straight | | Hometown: | Schenectady, NY | | Body type: | 5' 6" / Average | | Zodiac Sign: | Aquarius | | Smoke / Drink: | Yes / Yes | | Education: | College graduate | | Occupation: | Aspiring pornographer |
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Jack's Schools
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Union College
Schenectady,New York
Graduated: 1982
Student status: Alumni
Degree: Bachelor's Degree
Major: Electrical Engineering
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1981 to 1982 |
United States Coast Guard Academy
New London,Connecticut
Graduated: N/A
Student status: Alumni
Degree: None
Major: Electrical Engineering
Clubs: The "Asked to Resign" Club (a more serious offshoot of the Bad Attitude Club)
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1976 to 1979 |
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Jack's Companies
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Hughes Aircraft
El Segundo, CA US
Member of Technical Staff
Radar Systems Group
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6/82 - 2/86
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General Electric
Utica, NY US
Engineer/ Lead Electrical Engineer
Aerospace Electronics Systems Department
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2/86 - 6/89
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General Electric
Syracuse, NY US
Engineer
Ocean Systems Division
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7/89 - 11/90
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Quickturn Systems
Mountain View, CA US
Applications Engineer
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11/90 - 1/92
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PiE Design Systems
Sunnyvale, CA US
Principal MTS
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1/92 - 7/92
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Vertex Semiconductor
San Jose, CA US
Contract Engineer
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2/93 - 5/93
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Tandem/Compaq Computers
Cupertino, CA US
Engineer
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2/95 - 6/99
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Magma Design Automation
Cupertino, CA US
Application Engineer
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4/00 - 8/00
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Jack is maintaining Posted at 1:09 AM Aug 9
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Jack's Latest Blog Entry
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It was inevitable
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Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival
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A point to ponder
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"April 19th, it's a pretty good day...
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Avast, ye scurvy record companies!
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Jack's Blurbs |
About me:
Yeah, I'm 47 years old. Older than you, punk. Probably a lot older. Possibly too old to be playing on this AOL-for-hipsters hangout they call "MySpace". Where everybody is in everybody else's extended network.
Woo-eee.
So why am I here? Ask Miss Paige.
Rather than just ask me to join (which would have worked) or continue to "wish I would join" (which didn't), she outsmarted me: got me hooked on her blog (I hate that term, as well as most blogs, in fact) then posted an entry I could read only by permission, and I could ask for permission only after becoming a member.
So here I am. Out of place as usual...
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. By the time I had actually become a member, the tantalizing post was gone - she'd deleted it. Nicely played, that.
So my stated goal of being the last one on the planet not to be a MySpacer has been foiled. Ah, well. Might as well become a blogger (ugh).
Note: I just experienced the thrill of watching this so-called "editor" do its damndest to make my golden prose vanish, as I pressed the "Preview" button, and was treated to yet another friggin' login screen. Luckily, Firefox's "Back" button had kept a copy around. Don't let this happen to you, kids. Make a backup before you play with this rinkydink shit.
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Who I'd like to meet:
"Who I'd like to meet?"
It's whom, dammit.
Weird people. No, probably not what you're thinking of. I mean really weird people. The kind that can be cool without working so damned hard at it the way a normal hipster does (of course, trying hard to be cool pretty thoroughly defeats the goal, you silly hipsters, you).
The "weird kid" is what I'm talking about. If you're the weird kid, you'll know what I'm talking about. And I don't mean nerds, dammit. Geeks are OK (hey, I'm a geek, so there ya go), but dweebs, dorks and feebs stay over with the rest of the nerds. Yer just not weird enough, guys.
Somebody (assuming somebody actually reads this) will understand what I'm talking about. I hope... I know there's at least one other weird kid in this world, 'cause I have a niece (she's maybe five years old, and her name's Jackie, so maybe the name's got something to do with it) that I call the weird kid. Which she is. She returns the favor by calling me the weird kid. Which I am. Also. Even though I'm forty years older than she is, we each recognize the other as the weird kid.
Weird kids recognize each other, regardless of generational differences. Trust me, all you sickeningly normal people, we do. And we laugh at you behind your backs just like you laugh at us openly (although we laugh loudly and derisively, and we frequently snicker a lot). There are a heck of a lot more of you than there are of us, and we could give a rat's ass about that, 'cause we weird kids give not one sweet fuck what "people" think about us, or about much of anything else, either.
Anyone, who upon reading the preceding words, is feeling: (1) a kind of "eww" sensation; (2) resentment; (3) anger, possibly violent anger; or (4) bewilderment may be excused. You'll be happier with the: (1) wussies (sensitive Democrats, for example); (2) officious bureaucrats (like PTA members); (3) jocks, cops, and other meatheads (pretty self-explanatory); (4) corporate managers (they pretty much feel that way about most things).
All right, class. Anybody still here has an assignment: write me a message explaining how you know you're the weird kid. Maybe I'll read it, maybe not. Maybe I'll start up group for weird kids, but I kinda doubt that I'll get around to anything that silly; "a group of weird kids" is a weirder concept than say, "an individual fratboy"...
Update:
OK, before you click on the "Add to Friends" link, here's what you should know:
Unless I already know you, or you send an email explaining why you want to add me as a friend, you're probably wasting your time. When I get friend requests like that, I send a message asking exactly that question; no reply, no add. If you're just collecting "friends", there are plenty of other places where you'll have better luck. I'm old, cranky, don't play well with others, and am not likely to change.
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