One of the problems with an interactive blog is that comments can get lost in the shuffle. Many Gibberish readers come from Google searches on products I’ve reviewed, or from people researching some of my C&R rifles. Someone may comment on an article that is months old. These comments may go unnoticed under the default WordPress layouts. A few months ago I placed the most recent comments in a content block right underneath the search — and comments have gone way up as a result.

Today I’ve enabled an RSS feed for all comments. If you’re just interested in the comments of one entry, this isn’t for you. However, if you’re interested in following/participating in the general Gibberish discussion scrum, you’ll want to add this to your feed aggregator.

Thanks to pantone from Ars for posting this.

Settlers of Catan will launch on Xbox Live Wednesday, May 2. The game will sell for 800 points, or $10USD.

As mentioned in my previous posts about Settlers coming to the 360, I am most curious about how the AI will work, especially in isolation from each other. Playing against three bots in jSettlers is much more difficult than playing against one plus two human players. The jSettlers AI is written to keep human players from winning; for the AI to win is an ancillary objective.

Nice timing, roclar.

Thanks to Gibberish readers like Roclar and BushPutin for sending this in. There is a proposed bill in Congress to address the completely rapacious demands of the copyright board. Please, please call your representative and ask them to co-sponsor the bill. There’s a long way to go, but the first step is getting the bill out of committee and in front of the other members of Congress. You may find your local representative here and there is a pregenerated script you can read from if you’re nervous or don’t know what to say.

My call took about five minutes. I talked to “Kim,” a nice lady with a friendly voice. She had not heard of HR 2060 and stated that my representative probably hadn’t, either. I gave her a quick summary of the issue, stressing that Internet radio stations already pay royalties and that the proposed increase is too much and biased against online music stations. You may want to read up on my previous coverage on this issue in case you need to explain the situation to whomever you ring up.

The pregenerated script is below the jump!
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I went to the gym today, and as I do every Monday and Wednesday, followed up my cardio with ten minutes of tanning bed nukeage. I always spray down the bed with the supplied disinfectant before I get in. After hosing down the glass, I noticed that the wastebasket in the room was missing. I tossed the paper towels on the floor and ten minutes later I was thoroughly irradiated.

“So, uh, the wastebasket is missing in Bed 1,” I told the lady behind the desk.

“Yeaaaaah,” she replied. “We had an issue with the wastebaskets.”

Uh oh. I hope someone didn’t shit in one.

My curiosity was piqued. “What kind of issue?”

She glanced at the her co-worker behind the counter. Her co-worker furiously started typing on a keyboard, eyes shifting away.

Yeah, somebody probably shat in one.

“If it’s that scary,” I said, holding my hands up, “you don’t have to tell me.”

“It’s not scary.. It’s just that … someone couldn’t make it to the bathroom.”

Oh my god, someone did shit in one.

I explained that we had a similar “issue” when I worked for Eddie Bauer, way back in the early 90s. Someone asked to use our bathroom, and we told them that we didn’t have one for public use. There was a public restroom about fifty yards from our store. The person nodded. She shopped around a bit, took a polo into the dressing room, tried it on, and paid for it.

Later that night at closing, my co-worker Nick let out a yelp from one of the dressing rooms. Nick was from Greece — and when I say he was from Greece, the dude was from Greece. He was powerfully built, had dark hair and bushy eyebrows, and probably mumbled “SPARTANS! PREPARE FOR GLORY!” in his sleep. I moved over to the dressing room, and he had his shirt over his face. “Someone took a shit in the wastebasket.”

We drew straws, literally, to see who had to get rid of it. One of the stock guys “won.” Against management’s wishes, he threw the whole garbage bin away. They’d wanted him to scoop the deuce out somehow and disinfect the can. No matter who drew the shortest straw, I think our collective response to that idea was fuck that.

Anyway, here’s wishing that wherever you go, people poop where they’re supposed to.

Tanga.com has implemented a new ranking system for their nightly products. This is an interesting approach to the phenomenon of these “deal a day” sites: initially a site will bust out onto the scene with niche products, only to have to diversify later to make more money. Some sites, like Woot.com, completely lose focus. Woot used to have extremely good deals on electronics and computer equipment, with sellouts happening frequently. Now they have a lot of upscale items from all sorts of genres.
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With the recent dog and cat food scare, I thought some Gibberish pet owners might be wondering wtf to feed their four legged family members. My friend Fish Sprout has been making her own dog food for almost four years. She started rolling her own chow while her dog Hobie was “a medical disaster.” He had hip dysplasia, mange, gastroenteritis, severe allergies, and exocrine pancreatic insufficiency. In short, this guy was fucked up.

Fish Sprout thought she could improve Hobie’s health by improving his nutrition. Fish Sprout already tried top-tier mass market food as well as boutique brands. She turned to Dr. Billinghurst’s BARF diet. The BARF diet stands for Biologically Appropriate Raw Food or Bones And Raw Food. “You are feeding all natural foods where carbohydrates are very limited, it’s based on the theory of what wild dogs would eat,” Fish Sprout told me. “Some of it sounds like fluffy cock to me, but it seems to work.” Fish Sprout’s BARF diet for her dogs consists of 60% raw meaty bones, 35% muscle meats, and 5% offal. Now, it’s okay to think that’s fucking nasty, so did I. But it is interesting.
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Here are ten awareness and personal safety tips I practice constantly. Hopefully you aren’t going to learn anything new here, but just in case, here we are.

1. Have car or house keys ready for use before you approach your door. Fumbling around in your purse or pocket, especially at night, will lower your guard and ability to sense what’s around you. If possible, get your keys ready before you leave your current location.
2. Watch behind you while you are walking. You should be scanning to the front and sides of you at all times, but it never hurts to look over your shoulder or use the reflections of windows to see what’s behind you. Be especially cautious if you pass someone and then they wind up behind you.
3. If you have a purse or carry a bag of some kind, keep the opening shut, zippered if possible. For example, don’t leave your laptop bag with the flap open while you go up to the counter at a coffee shop to order another drink. You may come back to an empty bag.
4. Set timers to turn on lights so you don’t come home to an empty house. This may also alert you in the event someone is in your home and they have turned on a different light.
5. While driving, stay far enough back that you can see the tires of the vehicle in front of you. In most cases this will allow you enough room to move your vehicle around the one in front of you. This will allow you to scoot forward if someone is coming up too quickly behind you, or clear the lane for an emergency vehicle. It may allow you to get away in the event of a carjacking/assault. If you are in-between other cars at a stoplight, don’t be afraid to use your car to push/batter them out of the way.
6. Buy a Cyalume “glow stick” light stick and tie your house key to it. In the event of a home emergency (fire, break in), you can activate the light stick and throw it out the window. This will allow rescue personnel to easily enter your house instead of breaking down a door. In the case of break in/home invasions, intruders may have come through a window, or have picked and relocked a door. Maximize your chances by helping those who are trying to help you.
7. Make sure you have deadbolts on all the exterior doors of your house. I recommend deadbolts that require a key on either side. If you use the deadbolt with a knob on one side, someone could smash the glass in the door, reach inside, and unlock it. A determined intruder will defeat almost any door, but the idea here is to raise an alarm and buy enough time to do something.
8. Don’t leave ladders or anything that could be used to climb near your residence. Our neighbor left three ladders out unsecured for most of last summer while he worked on his home. Some people forget or neglect to lock their upper-story windows, or don’t lock them at all, thinking no one can climb up there. If someone does climb up to you someday, you may have your neighbors to thank.
9. Lock your car doors while driving. A man jumped out of the bushes near a stop sign and attempted to open my mother’s car door when she lived in Texas. I do not want to think about what would have happened had she left her doors unlocked.
10. While driving, keep your eyes on the front wheels of vehicles at upcoming intersections. If the wheels start to move, get ready to evade, brake, or sound the horn. The driver of the other vehicle is not paying attention — make sure you are.

If there was one thing I loved more than Mayorga Coffee was that I could buy their everyday blends at Costco in two pound bags at Costco. The beans were originally selling for $10 per two pounds, but even now at $15 or $16 it’s still worth it. The downfall was that Mayorga only had coffee in DC Metro-area Costcos. I either had to drive up to get some, or rely on my friends like Stomper or Sleepy Panda to bring them down. Until now!

The calendar board outside our local Costco mentioned that Mayorga Coffee was giving a taste/demonstration this month. I hope that means they will be stocking whole beans in our Costco soon. The previous “regional” blend was missing from the shelves upon further investigation, which I consider a pretty good sign.

The days of running gray-market beans from Maryland to Virginia may soon be over!

Gibberish reader Stomper sent this along to me in an email, and I think it’s important enough to warrant its own post.

This was mentioned in my intial post about the proposed increase to Internet radio royalties, but the email below has a direct link to a petition/feedback form for your area Congressperson. The feedback form is faxed over the wire; it only takes a few moments and is free. I’ve bolded the link below.

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

I’m writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends – the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I’m no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster’s business potential.

I hope you’ll take just a few minutes to sign our petition – it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

One of the suggested items in any preparedness kit is a signalling tool. They can be used to communicate with a rescue plane or helicopter. Or if you’ve seen the Hills Have Eyes remake, you can signal your mutant half-brother to initiate a raid. Any mirror-like item will do, but there are many special-purpose emergency mirrors. One such tool is the Wenger signal card, sold by EDC Depot. I purchased the signal card at the same time as the Fox Howler rescue whistle that I reviewed earlier. EDC Depot processed my order quickly, and I would recommend them to anyone.
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