For my Facebook friends, in case the embedded pic doesn't show up.

A WTF? pic if I've ever seen one.

I found this video because my friend Chris Smith favorited it on YouTube and shared it via the Google Reader. And wouldn't you know it, like the other naughty monkey, this one is wearing a fez.

It's a great tune and a great video too. Enjoy!

Robbie Williams - Me And My Monkey

There was me and my monkey
And with his dungarees and rollerblades smoking filter tips
Reclining in the passenger seat of my super-charged jet black Chevrolet
He had the soft-top down (he liked the wind in his face)
He said 'Son, you ever been to Vegas?' I said 'no'
He said 'that's where we're gonna go you need a change of pace'
And we hit the strip with all the wedding chapels and the neon signs
He said 'I left my wallet in El Segondo' and proceeded to take two grand of mine
We made tracks to The Mandalay Bay Hotel
Asked the bell boy if he'd take me and my monkey as well?
He looked in the passenger seat of my car and with a smile he said 'If your monkey's got that kind of money sir, then we've got a monkey bed!'
Me and my monkey With a dream and a gun I'm hoping my monkey don't point that gun at anyone
Me and my monkey Like Butch and the Sundance Kid
Trying to understand why he did what he did Why he did what he did
We got the elevator, I hit the 33rd floor We had a room up top with the panoramic views like nothing you'd ever seen before
He went to sleep in the bidet and when he awoke He ran his little monkey fingers through yellow pages
Called up escort services and ordered some okey doke
Forty minutes later there came a knock at the door
In walked this big bad ass baboon into my bedroom with three monkey whores
'Hi! My name is Sunshine these are my girls
Lace my palm with silver baby and oh yeah, they'll rock your world'
So I watched pay-per-view and polished my shoes and my gun
Was diggin' old Kurt Cobain sing about lithium
There came a knock at the door and in walked Sunshine 'What's up?
You'd better get your ass in here boy, your monkey's having too much of a good time!'
Me and my monkey Drove in search of the sun
Me and my monkey Don't point that gun at anyone
Me and my monkey Like Billy The Kid
Trying to understand why he did what he did Why he did what he did
Got tickets to see Sheena Easton, the monkey was high
Said it was a burning ambition to see her before he died
We left before encores, he couldn't sit still Sheena was a blast baby but my monkey was ill
We went to play black-jack, kept hitting twenty three
Couldn't help but notice this mexican just staring at me
Or was it my monkey? I couldn't be sure It's not like you'd never seen a monkey in rollerblades and dungarees before
Now don't test my patience 'cause we're not about to run
That's a bad ass monkey boy and he's packing a gun
'My name is Rodriguez', he says with death in his eye
'I've been chasing you for a long time amigos, and now your monkey's gonna die!'
Me and my monkey Drove in search of the sun
Me and my monkey We dont wanna kill no Mexican
But we got ten itchy fingers One thing to declare
When the monkey is high You do not stare You do not stare You do not stare
Looks like we got ourselves a Mexican standoff here boy
And I aint about to run Put your gun down boy
How did I get mixed up with this fucking monkey anyhow?

It's taken me two weeks to get around to posting about it, but The Agitator posted this great video of a band called Rock Sugar doing an amazing Mashup of Journey's Don't Stop Believin' and Metallica's Enter the Sandman.

Yes, you read that right.

Check it out...

Don't Stop The Sandman

Apparently the little linker-doohicky program (tech speak) I use to link my blog with my Facebook notes doesn't import everything well (especially embedded videos) and occasionally hoses up links.

I assure you the links work from my blog so if you're having trouble with one of my notes you can just click the View Original Post link at the bottom and it'll all be good.

This is my friend Rob D'Arc (of Planet of the Puppets fame) from his old public access TV show somewhere in California. Clip is probably about 20 years old.

The Mad Greek (some of the language in the outtakes may be NSFW)

Ah... Carolyn Jones. My first boy crush.

I posted about Laura of Croshay Design the other day. She shared the photo I took of her (with my new/old Samsung Digimax 301, which I also recently posted about) on her Flickr account.

Flickr reads the EXIF data from the file and makes it available along with the pic.This is where it gets pretty weird. Or maybe cool, I haven't decided.

If you go check out the pic on Flickr, to the right it tells you that I took the photo of her on August 12, 2086. I'd say she looks pretty good for a centenarian.

Perhaps I should RTFM and figure out how to set the little internal clock/calendar dealie in the camera. I'd hate to confuse future historians.

Cuz the future is not what it used to be. And furthermore, it never was.

Right then. As you were.

I coulda sworn I'd blogged about this long ago, but apparently not.

At least, I can't seem to search it up.

Dropbox is a cool online storage site. They'll give you 2 gigabytes of storage for freesies. You can use their online interface, but they also have a little app that lives on your machine (versions for Windoze, Mac and Linux) that autosyncs your local and online folders. You have a "Public" folder that you can put things in that you want folks to be able to download and Dropbox supplies each with its own URL so you can just mail the links out and/or blog about them to share them around.

I've recently learned that you can share a folder with other people, making such things as online music collaborations a lot easier. Since I'm planning on doing some more of that soon, I was tickled. Further, the folks you're sharing the folder with will have the same autosync capabilities. For an example of how cool that is, it means when you lay down a bass line for your friend's project you just drag it into your local copy of the folder and can go on surfing the web and such instead of emailing the file or uploading it somewhere else and sending a link. The next time your friend logs on, her local copy of the folder will sync up and your bitchin' bass line gets delivered without further ado.

But here's the best part. If you want to get a Dropbox account you can click this link and both you and I will get an extra 250 megs of storage, just because you signed up with a referral from an existing user. They top this bonus out at 3 gigs — I don't know if that's total or it's 3 more on top of your first free 2 gigs — but either way it's a good thing.

And now I have a blog post with my referral link in it to send my friends to when I start the next collab project. And you, even if you're not into doing the music collab thing, now know where to get a chunk of free backup stowage.

Win!

You often hear me talking about Pike Place Market — mostly grumbling about a given busking day or raving about some adventure or other — but I hardly ever talk about my compatriots down there, a group that affectionately calls themselves "market rats." Since many of them have been very supportive of me for many years, let's just change that now.

The lovely lady you see pictured to the left here is Laura Killoran. (Click on the pic to see a larger version in a popup window.) Laura is Croshay Design and she makes "handmade wearables and original crochet patterns" — amongst other goodies — and makes them available at the Market, on her website and in her new Etsy dot Com shop.

Laura is pictured here on the front of the Joe Desimone bridge. If she looked a little to her right, she'd be looking at "the bridge spot" that I often talk about when I'm posting/tweeting/etc. about busking.

Not only is she a generous supporter of my ukulele thrashings via her donations to my case, she is also a source of smiles, good humor, great conversation, egoboo and sometimes just straight commiseration on those occasions when the passing pedestrians are being particularly unkind. In case I haven't mentioned it lately, thanks Laura!

She makes hats for both men and women. Due to the nature of my personal fantasy™, I'm especially fond of the 1920's look of her cloche hats. Her Rose Cloche is pictured here. I've seen a lot of different ladies wearing these and they all looked fabulous in them.

If you're lucky enough to make it to the Pike Place Market, look for the Croshay Design table. Tell her Hobbit sent you. If you can't make it, visit her Etsy.com shop. Either way you can get yourself a stylin', comfortable and fun addition (or several) to your wardrobe.

Then I suggest you check out Phredd.

Elmer's Electric Tricycle

So. Don't tell me I never gave you nothing.

(Hat tip to Woodshed at Uke Hunt)

Wisdom from Scott Adams.

"Technically, you're already a cyborg. If you keep your cell phone with you most of the time, especially if the earpiece is in place, I think we can call that arrangement an exobrain. Don't protest that your cellphone isn't part of your body just because you can leave it in your other pants. If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body. In fact, one of the benefits of being a cyborg is that you can remove and upgrade parts easily. So don't give me that "It's not attached to me" argument. You're already a cyborg. Deal with it."

Every time I see someone with a Bluetooth earpiece for their cellphone I tap my ear and say, "You know, that's how the Borg started."

I confess, I'll probably have one of those earpieces one of these days. I'm still hoping that I'll be around — and can afford it — when they're installing cerebellum jacks so I can jack right into the web.

Meantime, I want me a Dilbert Pocket.

I spent the morning at the Pike Place Market being filmed for the part of "street entertainer" — big surprise, what? — for the upcoming film Late Autumn (working title). This is a film by writer/director Tae-Yong Kim (Memento Mori, Pass Me, If You Were Me, On the Road,Two, Family Ties).

Unlike the earlier movie I was filmed for, this one actually had the camera focused on me for an entire take so I ended up doing the make-up and wardrobe thing for the first time. The wardrobe basically consisted of what I usually wear and a sweater vest. Near as I can tell it's because the scene I'm in will cut between the camera looking over my shoulder at the crowd I'm playing for (including the two stars of the flick) and a "face on" view to establish that it's this busker with a ukulele. Since I was wearing a white shirt, they had to do something so I wasn't washing out the camera right behind me.

The make-up was just a light application of base and powder, a sort of "anti-lip gloss" (goo with a matte finish that Dawn the makeup lady said she used to make sure the guys lips aren't all shiny) and then I retouched my moustache (Dawn gave me a little stiff-bristled brush — I think it's originally for eyelash goo — that works well for mustache waxing and shaping). All this mustache talk brings me to the pic above and to the left.

No, it's not taken today, but after the sagging, tired, old droopy-stached me in this photo, I wanted to show y'all the mustache when it's still early in the day and is feeling all waxed and perky.

Now let's talk briefly about the pic to the right.

They were allowing actual Market shoppers to walk through the scene, but they had selected extras to be the actual "crowd" watching me play. If you picture them in sort of an arc in front of me, the one at the far left looked real familiar.

Sure enough, it was Audra of the Titillation Twins. She's the one on the right in the picture (I'm pretty sure). The pic was taken backstage at the Columbia City Theater where I opened for the burlesque show "Sex & Chocolate: A Libertine Banquet." This was back in late March of 2007. You can read about the whole weekend here. Audra says she's not doing so much burlesque lately, preferring to be a vocalist with an electronica band.

A fun day though I wish, like the first movie, this one paid me at the end of my bit instead of mailing me a check. Oh, and the wardrobe guy insisted I remove the Route 666 pin from my hat. The Fallen Angel brought it back for me from her most recent visit to Hell, Michigan and I kinda like it on my hat. Click the pic for the full monty.

Ah, show biz.

To the left you'll see a close-up of the original naughty monkey puppet, created for me by Rob D'Arc of Planet of the Puppets. You'll note he's promoting fezerocity all by his little lonesome. Rob sells his "popup puppets" — you can open and close the mouths on them — both online and at the Pike Place Market.

If you click on the image you'll get a larger version in a popup window. The yellowish arc that the monkey is sitting on is the top right part of the mirror on the dresser in my room. A few months back I made a similar post, but that one features a tiny plastic monkey. To give you some idea of the scale on this monkey, the stick he's mounted on — it says "PLA" on it in the pic — is a the kind of tongue depressor sold in craft shops.

Getting him installed up there was easy. Since the mirror — a pretty weighty plate glass thing — is just sitting on the dresser top and the top leans against the wall, I simply stuck the tongue depressor part between the mirror and the wall. Look, Ma! No holes in the wall! It also serves two purposes. First, it gets the little monkey visible where I can enjoy him and second, it gets him off the top of the dresser, reducing the clutter thereupon.

As I mentioned in the previous post, a while back I wrote a song called Naughty Monkey — one of a number that I have written since I switched over to ukulele — and it was the inspiration for the puppet. For anyone just finding my blog, here it is as recorded by my band, Snake Suspenderz, on our CD, Serpentine.

Hope you enjoy!