superpowers!

That's a picture of the mock air force one that flew over nyc the other day scaring the shit out of anyone and everyone. Big Brother apparently just wanted to see how air force one would look flying through the canyons of the big apple. This is reminiscent of something, but I just can't put my finger on it. Oh yeah...

try this...

ok, sweet trick to try right before you fall asleep. get a cell phone, be in a dark room. As you probably know, when you see something bright in the darkness, it leaves a trail on your vision. with that in mind, write yourself a message with light from your cell, or even better, a penlight. Then close your eyes as fast as possible. 

do it, you won't

this goes out to you

that's right, congratulations is in order to the bystander, the most recent recipient of my hatred. The bystander has no home, requires no food. The foibles of other people provide the only sustenance necessary. The bystander is a bastard that's always there when you fuck up. He is always armed to the teeth with witty retorts. The bystander appears seconds before a stack of papers is dropped, or in my case: someone hits a large stone on their skateboard. While he shows no signs of being competent in the subject which he is making fun of, the Bystander is always ready to offer painfully obvious advice like, "hey man, there's a rock there!" OH! THATS what that was?!?! thank you mr. bystander, for if I was not privy to your acute sense of sight I probably never would have noticed the rock that stopped my skateboard! 

The bystander is a tricky bitch. He appears in many different disguises, but most frequently he appears as an innocent child walking home from school. The disguise is very transparent however, and most of the time you can tell that the poor kid is possessed by the Bystander when he demonstrates the wit of a standup comedian coupled with the timing and delivery of a doctor delivering a christmas-day baby. Both of these qualities are clearly not representative of the child exhibiting them.

But let's take a closer look at the Bystander and truly shed some light on this curious creature.

Despite the image the bystander projects, he is actually quite weak, and very unskilled. His sole purpose is to trick others into thinking he is an authority on everything, and as such an authority, is licensed to dole out helpful hints and tips to seemingly lesser skilled individuals. But all of this is a sham. The Bystander puts this up as a front to cover up a severe lack of skills of any kind. Here's a few helpful hints to deal with the bystander:

1: Have a strong middle finger. You should exercise it frequently and rely on it as your go-to- defense.

2: Ask the bystander nicely to demonstrate the proper technique for whatever the situation is. If you dropped a stack of papers, kindly prompt the bystander to show you the correct way to carry papers. Now you're just wasting the bystander's time, something he most likely wasn't counting on when he decided to offer his worthy opinion. If he tries to dodge the responsibility, explain how you've been having problems with carrying paper lately, and 

since he offered his advice from a distance, you would like a much more detailed demonstration of the proper method.

3: Speak gibberish to the Bystander. Act a fool, go fucking crazy, pretend to be an escapee from a methadone clinic. Depending on how your theatrics pan out, the Bystander may think twice before adding his two cents the next time he's in particularly advisory mood for a short time. 

Everybody has seen someone trip on the stairs, or crash into a curb on a bicycle. It's almost impossible to avoid a passerby in these situations. But be strong and do not allow the Bystander to possess you...

two amazing songs

Boredoms
Listening to these songs is sort of a time investment but as is(was) the truth with any investment, you get a full return. I just found this band called Boredoms, they're a noise rock collab from Japan. House of Sun is just a cool song to have going on in the background as it's not the most dynamic of songs. Seadrum on the other hand is 20 minutes of power. I was listening to this last night while I was VERY high and I literally sat back for the duration of the song with my eyes closed and just grooved on it.

a few days late

cooked this up on monday night, can you tell?

4/20 madness from Jack Byers on Vimeo.

happy april holiday!

first os kickflip

FINALLY

2 runs on claremont canyon rd

This is not me, and for that I am happy because this scared the shit out of me just to watch. Patrick Rizzo and Noah Sakamoto are certifiably insane...

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo.

A Film by: Ari Marcopoulos
Director of Photography: Colin Blackshear
Producer: Neville Wakefield

happy 4/20

I jotted down some thoughts today about weed, hemp, and life in general.

I love weed. It is one of the most physiologically versatile plants on the face of the earth. It's been traced back through the annals of history as a companion to humans. Hemp pulp was hammered out into sheets of paper long before the words for that paper existed. Hemp seeds are per weight one of the most proteinaceous foodstuffs (finally got to use that word!) on the planet. Hemp fibers are exceptionally long due to the fact that the stem of hemp can grow to about 20' despite being only 3-4 inches thick at it's thickest point. Hemp is a natural detoxifier and is thus the perfect rotating crop. Hemp can grow in a wide range of soil pH, and will flourish in soil that any other plant would never take root in because it is devoid of nutrients. During the course of it's growth the hemp plant will impregnate the soil with nutrients. If hemp were incorporated into crop rotations, no field would ever be unused. After the nutrients had been depleted by a crop like corn or peas, Hemp could take root and re-vitalize the soil. On top of this revitalization, the crop produced from the hemp field would fetch an attractive price in many different markets. Further increasing the profit margin, the whole process of growing and selling hemp requires just 20 hours of labor/acre. That includes seeding the land all the way up to packaging the harvested plants for shipping.
There's no magic bullet that will take away the effects of years of outsourcing and hedge funds on the economy. One thing is for sure though, if the US has any hope of re-emerging from the current economic bog, we need to increase the hell out of the Gross Domestic Product. What better way to do this than with the help of hemp.
But then we get the inevitable weed-bashing. The anti-"drug" commercials, which shouldn't even pertain to weed as there are much more pressing substance abuse problems. Go into any semi-affluent highschool in the nation right now and you will see that kids are no longer just smoking weed. They're reading about prescription drugs online and raiding their parents medicine cabinets accordingly. I've even heard of parties where there's a big candy bowl filled up with random uppers, downers and what have you.
Sure there's the stigma that smoking weed makes you lazy and robs you of your motivation...and that's partially true. But to those kinds of kids who are smoking just to be entertained, weed is just the same as another drug. This is the real problem that should be stopped. Ripping a bong until your lungs are flat is just the same as drinking simply to black out, but with arguably fewer bad effects.
Smoking weed for me isn't about seeing how much I can get the room to spin. A good friend once told me that getting high is all about just putting on your thinking cap. It struck me as an eloquent way to sum up the millions of individual effects of weed on the brain.
The glory of ganja is it's partnership with learning. I can read a textbook for two hours to memorize cell processes and patterns of chemical reactions, but when I put the book down and smoke a bowl, I start to think about how those things relate to the big picture.
Pine trees are impossible. Well, more like improbable. But when you get to thinking about what is needed for a pine tree to grow out of the ground, it seems damn near impossible that there's enough of the things in the world that millions of people cut them down and post them up in their living rooms once a year. Next time you see a pine tree with cones on it, walk as far away from it as you can while still being able to see the cones. You'll notice that the cones seem to be concentrated towards the top of the tree, even though there were clearly cones on the bottom branches too. The cones on the top of the tree (the bigger ones) are female cones. The male cones are located on the lower part of the tree, and there's a reason for this. The male cones release pollen grains, and if one of these pollen grains were to find it's way into a female cone on the same tree....well then it would hold true to the old saying "it's all in the family". Incest is looked down upon because it leads directly to genetic mutation.
The female cones being located on the top of the pine tree is an evolutionary adaptation, since the trees whose female cones were randomly located higher up on the tree developed less mutations and more readily passed on their genetic material.
But why are pine trees improbable? For the answer we look to the male cones. As I said above, the male cones release a pollen grain containing two sperm cells. I'll assume that we can follow a single pollen grain, and that it is one of the lucky ones that actually hits its' mark. The pollen grain is released and is grabbed by the wind. The wind takes the pollen grain to the upper branches of a pine tree over a mile away, or rather a pine tree over a mile away happens to be in the path of the pollen grain.
The pollen grain has to land in a distinct spot of sap on the bottom of one of the flakes of a female pine cone. Once it lands, one sperm cell begins tunneling through the flake of the pine cone, eventually reaching the ovule located in the cone. When I say eventually, I really mean it, because this step can take up to 2 years to complete. Once the sperm tube is complete, the other sperm cell travels down it towards the ovule, and begins fertilization. This stage can take up to 15 years!!! When fertilization is complete and the ovule is shed (assuming it doesn't succumb to weather or animals looking for a treat) and the seed falls to the ground where it faces next to impossible odds that it will actually take root. Once the seed takes root, it spends years as a perfectly sized snack for all manner of forest creatures. Assuming it makes it past all of those odds, it now must combat lightning, logging, mudslides and floods, harsh winters, and human neglect in order to become a tall pine tree.
When I'm high (as I am right now) my mind dwells on that learned information and then branches out on tangents. Weed is something that will mature as I mature. It's not something I will grow out of, since it complements every part of my life.

Colorado University @ Boulder, 4/20/09; 4:20pm

Queerman, Monster Mash, Zoomacroom...

The first Harry Potter movie is on TV right now. I wonder what kind of drugs J.K. Rowling had access to? But back to the point, the quidditch scene reminded me of Wizard People, Dear Reader. In short, WPDR is an alternative audiotrack to the movie version of Sorcerers stone. It's a pretty lengthy undertaking, I myself haven't even watched it in its entirety, but here's the quidditch scene, or should I say the "Cribbage Match". I'm not a fan of Harry Potter at all, as I think it's giving false hope to kids everywhere. If you live in a cupboard under the stairs, owls will not begin peppering your house with letters to take you away to a magical wizard university. Chances are you're going to continue being confined to a cupboard under the stairs, and most likely develop a psycho-social problem in your later years stemming from your years in said cupboard. But not really...

this is what music videos looked like in 1967

holy HELL

WHAT?! so sick

this is 10 times as rare as a meet and greet luncheon with bigfoot and a dodo bird...get some
ratatat and animal collective-Mirando

Here's the original song without Animal Collective in case that's your thing too

as promised

finally got around to grabbing some pics of the work I've done on the "wave" skateboard, stay tuned for me to figure out a better way to take a picture of it. . .
                                 BOTTOM:
                                                               TOP:

this cool thing

I rough sketched this during class and it seemed like a cool idea so drew it out on illustrator. It's not a typo by the way. lame line, wack design. . . but what even is that thing? cya later JOBIN
                                   rough sketch:

                                   Final Product

Here's some cool music to check out too. song is spiritualize by Lotus. Download this CD.

click on "lotus2007-10-31.shn_vbr_mp3.zip", it's the 206 meg file near the top.  

                                

night on the town

went to a party on the SU hill with my friend Andy. Got into some mischief. Highlight of the night was definitely the terrified SU kid who thought two zombies were after him...

my friend anna made this for her graphic design class, and i think it looks pretty cool. I did the graphic for the skis I'm wearing-the skis were originally all black. The "wave", the board I've been drawing on, is looking NUTS but alas I keep forgetting to cop batteries for my camera so it'll have to wait. I woke up at 4am a few nights ago and just attacked the board with markers. I wasn't even drawing anything in particular, it just flowed from my brain to the deck. That means the board is probably never going to see the action it was meant for, but I can live with that. stay tuned for some pictures of THAT. anyway, shout out to anna benedetto for a nifty little edit:

good sunny day music

I think I posted this song a few months ago but it's much better to listen to on the ONE sunny day we get in over a week. Time to break in my new longboard

that's just ranunculus

the scientific name for Creeping Buttercup is Ranunculus repens.
I spend a lot of time drawing things as they appear under a microscope. Most people just throw down the general shape of whatever they see and add a few squiggles in for detail so they can leave lab as fast as possible. Now don't get me wrong, by no means do I enjoy lingering around in lab. But I do like putting some time into what I'm drawing. Here's a few pages that I thought had the coolest looking things on them. This stuff is cool as shit though. Ok, flowers are nice to look at. But have you ever seen what's inside a flower? Yeah, it's not just green and made out of stem. Earthworms have gaping mouthes, I bet you never even thought about that. But don't take my word for it, look at the bottom right corner of the last set of drawings.

Lumbricus=earthworm, /translation

pretty cool, right? NAWT

2 ortiz joints

all my life i just wanted to be a gangstaaa
first song is fire, but I think Joell Ortiz looks like Frank from It's Always Sunny. i'm not the biggest Ortiz fan but he works in these 2 songs. second song is sick, the sampled beat is from the "Leyendecker" by Battles, also a great band.

no matter how hard I try

I cannot stop finding new music. It creeps up on me when I least expect it. It's not a huge deal though...you know, since I like music and all. Without further ado, I give you Black Moth Super Rainbow. Go ahead, push play. It starts off a little slow, but the synth is satisfyingly retro. Just like Salvia, stuff starts to get really interesting about one minute in...

new and improved wave

added a few things

in other news

several bands of cirrus clouds have been sighted in my cup of tea, signifying a change in weather may be ahead. Cirrus clouds often appear in the aftermath of a large storm or atmospheric event. Boiling water coming to a rest provides ideal conditions for white-tea-cirrus clouds to form.

room changes

Getting high is nice. I mean there's the obvious reasons: music sounds cool, creativity flows a bit easier, food tastes better, etc. I, for some inexplicable reason, clean up when I'm high. I don't even mean to do it...but if I've recently inhaled some shrubbery and my room is messy...I start organizing. I should be the kid in the Marijuana commercials-second time I've said something along those lines in about 3 days...real original. But I can picture it now: this is your room (messy room)....this is your room on drugs (neat, efficiently organized room). I've never been able to put my finger on it until last night, when I broke a relatively long hiatus of being high at home, but there I was, dashing around my room stashing doo-dads in nooks and crannies. If I ever have kids, I'm gonna make sure they get high before they clean their rooms so I know they will be doing a good job. Incentive, incentive, incentive....

weekend

Got out of class on friday, decided to head to Ithaca for some fun. Hit the road at about 6:30, got in around 8. First stop was the local Taco Bell for a quick dinner. Despite the fact that the inside of the Bell was closed, we were still admitted and fed a nourishing and delicious meal, complete with some baked apple treats compliments of the staff of Taco Bell. Left Taco bell, everyone but myself, being the driver, took some warm-up shots of whisky. All of a sudden an ambulance comes roaring into the parking lot, lights ablaze, sheriff in tow. He proceeds to pull right up to my car, pause for about 20 seconds, then drive about 20 feet away, unload the stretcher and hoof it into the Bell. Strange events indeed.
Picked up good friend Juliana from Cornell and headed to a house on the outskirts of I-town. Party takes place in sick house, with lots of people painting upstairs, and others banging on various musical/nonmusical instruments downstairs. The crown jewel of the whole shebang however, was the balloon room. The balloonroom was simply what it promised, a room of balloons.

The balloons provided limitless entertainment, especially the yellow one. But after a while the balloon room took it's toll and we moved upstairs to do some painting. In all the excitement, I had been hitting Senor whisky a bit hard and didn't come up with anything too deep. Juliana came up with a sweet little number that now adorns the wall of the house.
Soon after, a congregation of people joined an impromptu jam session using anything from a saxophone, to bongo drums, to regular old pots and pans from the kitchen. I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty impressive and definitely one of the coolest things i've ever witnessed. Night gets foggy from that point on, as I had at this point become fairly plastered.
I never know how to end blog posts by the way, it's always a torrent of thoughts coming out of my mind followed by silence. But check this out, I've been working on building a short drop down skateboard and it's coming along nicely, I just more or less finished the graphics I want for the bottom. 10-4, Over and out...
PS-Juliana has a blog too, and it's a much better place to waste some time than mine.

don't even THINK about trying to sleep on this one

Del the Funky Homosapien has dropped his highly anticipated album, Funk Man (the stimulus package). Those of you who are familiar with Del already know, but for those who don't, he's been on the scene for almost 20 years and hasn't stopped killing it. I had the fortune of seeing Del in Burlington in fall of '08 and it was a dope show with a good bit of the Hiero imperium backing Del, and Devin the Dude to get the show rolling. But back to the album...did I mention it's free? Oh yes.....get some. 

Man lights cigar.

Man falls asleep. Man wears band-aid for several weeks

and speaking of the flaming lips...

flaming lips does white stripes: shit is fire

comin at ya

I've been bumping this song non-stop for the past 2 days, it's a sneak peak track from the upcoming G&E collab between Eligh of Living Legends, and The Grouch, 2 guys doin it big out of cali at the moment. The song sounds like it samples The Flaming Lips' In the Morning of the Magicians, which I wholeheartedly approve of. Enjoy:

it's that time again...

it's been a while since i put up some music so here's what i've had on heavy rotation lately:

enjoy-

I have decided to become a vegetarian

well it's now the month of april, and i feel like doing something new. you'll just have to figure out on your own what it is. In the mean time: here is the story of my day told in two pictures (there may be some extra words in there for extra clarification)

pH determination via Acid-Base titration

extra points will be awarded for telling me 

the pH of that there solution.

favorite part of the library: the drug/gang/

mafia/ crime literature section