Quartz City – Page 31 – by Chris Barrus

McConnell’s Turkish Coffee

We interrupt our participation in Anti-NaBloPoMo (a negative space to counter the posting NaBloPoMo hordes) for the following announcement: Scientists working feverishly in the Quartz City labs have reached a critical objective proof. This is The Best Ice Cream in the Known World…

Fosselman’s makes a damn fine ice cream, and to be honest – any of their ice creams handily trounce most available options. Three out of four times I’m ready to make that drive out to Alhambra, but sometimes you want something that is so over-the-top ridiculous that it’ll make Coldstone cower in fear and give fever dreams to Red Bull drinkers. Enter McConnell’s Turkish Coffee. Pull off the lid and you’re confronted with, well, something that looks like a soiled ash tray.

Yes those are ground espresso beans in there.

This is not an attempt to generate some nerdfury. McConnell’s Turkish Coffee is the Best Ice Cream in the Known World. Full stop. I challenge some of the other worlds out there to come up with something better.

The Small Victories That Get You Through Life

Holding down the high score on Tempest at Ground Kontrol in Portland.

I’m vaguely ashamed by my rather weak 109,526 high score. Back In The Day my average score would be around 200-220K after twenty minutes or so. Still, I’ll take what I can get. Ground Kontrol’s machine is in terrific shape (along with their Robotron machine which gave me a quite a workover)

Watching the fires

Just stepped out for a coffee and noticed a new column of black smoke a little bit east of where most of the smoke has been coming from. I wonder if this is the Acton fire. The Mt. Wilson Solar Tower webcam has a better image.

HPWREN has webcams distributed throughout San Diego County. The Lyons Peak webcam is pretty close to the action.

I know I’ve been harsh on Twitter before, but the KPBS and LA Times Twitter streams are pretty informative along with this Google Earth/Map page.

Fire crew scanner streams

Just as FYI to everyone, here are some online police/fire radio scanner streams.

ScanOC is streaming Silverado/Portola fire crew radio via WMP.
ScannerBuff is streaming Agua Dulce, Santa Clarita, Orange County, and Witch Creek fires (you’ll need to install the TeamSpeex client first)
Santa Clarita Live Scanner Audio has several different stream formats of police and fire radio.
The Listening Post is also offering some streams but I haven’t been able to load them.

I’ll update this list as I get more information. The SoCalScan group on Yahoo has been a good source of information.

Irvine Fire

QC was in Irvine this afternoon and in the space of two hours watched as a small column of smoke up the toll road turned into a full-on fire – blacking out the sky.

Ironically, the main emergency management center for Orange County sits on top of the fire area at Loma Ridge. Hope there’s a contingency plan for when/if the emergency center burns down.

There’s a few more pictures on the Flickr stream. Please be careful out there folks.

No Really, It’s Up To You

Why are the gentlemen below grinning?

Because they’ve monetized the advance leak of their own album
Because they threw a stink bomb into the morass of major label fear, uncertainty, and doubt
Because they’re in possession of real data as to what people will/will not pay for downloadable albums
Because they’ve steered the discussion about album downloads back to, well, complete albums, not just piecemeal tracks
Because they’ve made album release dates exciting again
Because they’re taking bets on which journalist/blogger/whatever will come up with the most preposterous story as to What It All Means (by the way, hey Pitchfork – an ARP is also a type of synthesizer)
All of the above

So last week I pulled the trigger on the electronic version of In Rainbows as soon as the announcement was made. While waiting for the download announcement to arrive last night, the mood about the music boards was kinda old fashioned – it felt like everyone was waiting in line outside Tower Records for the midnight sale. When I finally received the download link, I got a respectable 415 KB/s download speed. Overall an unbelieveably easy transaction.

In the interest of full disclosure: I paid 50p per track. If the dollar wasn’t so crap against the pound, I would have gone for the full vinyl and CD package. I’m not a Radiohead superfan, but I do want this experiment to succeed.

Meanwhile, Thom – meet Trent. Thom, Trent… Meet Tim.

International Cephalopod Awareness Day

Did you remember to hug an octopus today? I did!

Shining a torch in the dark crevices of the Uncanny Valley

“There Will Come Soft Rains” is one of the few pieces of fiction that can still give me a category 5 case of disturbed unsettlement. This video comes pretty damn close. Thanks Sterling! Yeesh…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYGhmJD9LKc[/youtube]

I wonder if those guys were aware of this?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A2Fs1hwYQo[/youtube]

Andromeda Strain vs. Colour Out Of Space FITE!

I’ve been eyeballs deep in Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money, & Power (short review so far: unlike most corporations the oil industry operates on schedules of decades – they’re already way ahead of most critics, power groups, and governments) to pay much attention to recent national debates on men’s restroom symbolic interactions and whether or not the world is round or flat but the Peruvian “mystery illness” meteor is high weirdness chum in the water.

The first thing I thought was that it’s not a meteor or inquisitive Fungi from Yuggoth, but a deorbited spy satellite loaded with radioactive fuel. There’s evidence for this… In 1978, Cosmos 954 crashed into Canada, spewing radioactivity over 600km of the Northwest Territories. More recently there was the crash of Mars 96 which had 200g of plutonium pellets which may (or may not) have landed in Chile and Bolivia.

Then there’s this story from the Oberg article:

After the explosion of a rocket near the Baikonur cosmodrome in 1970, Soviet soldiers found a nuclear battery in the wreckage. Later, investigators looking for the battery discovered that the shivering soldiers had secretly kept it as a hand-warmer in their poorly heated guardhouse. In this case, the unit was spotted by one of the searchers and confiscated immediately.

At least the Peru meteor didn’t crash into anywhere in the Middle East. Cthulhu knows how the itchy trigger fingers would react there.

Rat Attack

Last month I posted this photo of Fredo the Rat sitting on top of one of my amps when we were recording. Fredo’s been sitting on top of one amp or another since finding him at Ikea last year and so, yeah, he’s a cute stuffed rat.

I knew Fredo had some relatives out there in the world, but no clue that Fredo’s Russian brethern were so dang numerous. Ummm… Eeek?

[via English Russia]