Will Franken will be at The Odeon in “Thank You Odeon”, Sunday, January 30th.

If you have never seen Will Franken perform before, let us just say that he is comedy for people who hate stand-up comedy. For anybody who’s ever loved the structural chaos of Monty Python, the irreverance and absurdity of The Kids In The Hall, or the scathing satire of Mr. Show, Will Franken is right up your alley, off to the left, smoking a cigarette, looking furtively downward and trying to suppress his real thoughts as you walk right past him because you think you’re better than him, don’t you? Well, you’re all the same. You just want somebody you’re attracted to, don’t you?

Impossible Productions presents: “Princess Bride: The Play”, Friday through Sunday, just recently extended through February 12th at The Darkroom in San Francisco.

What happens when the Most Beautiful Woman in the World marries the Bravest Prince in the World-and he turns out to be a son of a bitch? Fencing, Fighting, True Love, Strong Hate, Harsh Revenge, Lots of Bad Men, Lots of Good Men, Some Beautiful Women, Beasties Monstrous and Gentle, Some Swell Escapes and Captures, Death, Lies, Truth and a little Sex abound in Princess Bride the Play, Impossible Production’s tribute to the hottest fairy tale ever written. All we need is a Miracle.

Once word got out about BORG2, it wasn’t long before other “BORG’s” starting appearing…

First there was BORG3, a commercialized Burning Man for spectators. Then came BORG4 for the ravers. Soon BORG’s started showing up everywhere. In fact you couldn’t even walk around the Mission without overhearing someone talking about the latest BORG that they started.

By far our favorite is BORG is borg9, “The other white borg”:

A place for you to vent your true feelings about the torrid love-hate-love relationship between Flash and Flash. Somewhere to sigh a collective “fuck, this endless burning man shit is really boring me to tears.” The safe zone for the true believers. Because BORG9 is going to SMASH YOU PUNKS.

UPDATE: The borg9 Art Grant has been announced.

Speaking of milestones, 21 years ago today Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh to the world. Lengendary Mac hacker Scott Knaster has released a previously unseen video of the unveiling of the Mac. The servers that host this video are getting slammed, you may need to find a good mirror of it.

We here at Laughing Squid are big Apple dorks, so we thought we might share this bit of history with you.

UPDATE: here’s an up-to-date list of mirrors

Firefox 1.0 has just hit the 20,000,000 mark.

Still using IE? What better time to switch than now. 20 million downloads can’t be wrong.

While you are at it, why not give Outlook the boot as well and move over to Thunderbird. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

If making the web a better place excites you, then help spread the word.

Here are my photos from Scot Nery’s “Crash Course” show on Friday, January 21st. The theme was “Superhero Business Meeting” and the special guest was Will Franken. No one was injured, except for the food.

Note the jar of “rat feces” on Scot’s plywood cooking table in the photo.

Now that were up-and-running with our new blog, using the wonderful WordPress weblog application, I thought might be a good idea to meet some fellow WordPress bloggers. The above photo is from this Saturday’s unofficial WordPress Meetup in San Francisco. There are thousands of Meetups that take place all over the country on a variety of interests (not just web geek stuff). Check out the Meetup website for more info.

Pictured are (L-R): Ryan King, recent Houston-to-San Francisco transplant and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Om Malik and Nicole Lee.

Also in attendance were Craig Cook, Glenda Bautista, Marc Weidenbaum and Chris Messina from Spread Firefox and Drupal (CivicSpace Labs).

Not present was representation from the 17-inch PowerBook family. Also, contrary to what the photo might suggest, one can easily use other non-Apple computers to update their blog (it’s just not as fun).

So, I finally got around to setting up a PHP photo gallery with a MySQL database. The ability to customize the look and feel using CSS and templates was a major consideration when it came to finding a good script to use. After looking at dozens of scripts, I came across singapore, great little open source, image gallery script. Check it out, this may be the one you have been looking for.

Here’s the top level of our new gallery, however if you want to see all the old stuff as well, then you should start here.

And yes, singapore can easily be installed on websites that are hosted at Laughing Squid.

Check out Scot Nery cooking, juggling, & getting hurt at // CrAsH COurSe // every week, Friday through Sunday at CLIMATE theater in San Francisco.

This week’s guest is Will Franken and the theme is “Super Hero Business Meetings”.

Crash Course is the second generation of Scot Nery’s ridiculous cooking shows. It’s like a televised cooking show without quality instruction. Fun recipes cooked to fun themes with fun guest chefs. It guarantees to be super fantastic. Every week the theme, guest and meal change. Come, laugh, cheer, and nibble on some unusual grub.

UPDATE: Here are my photos from Scot’s January 24th show.

Ok, so I’m sure by now you’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about BORG2, the Burning Man splinter group started by Chicken John and Jim Mason. Well here’s a first-hand impression of BORG2 from Rachel Weidinger which was forwarded to us by TheNetworkGirl (both Rachel and TheNetworkGirl are BORG2 Art Council 2005 candidates):

Local Nerd Discovers New, Strangely Idealistic Tribe, “BORG2″

Rachel Weidinger, a nerd originally of Columbus, Ohio, recently stumbled upon a group of people who call themselves BORG2. (And by stumbled, we mean saw the announcement for a gathering of BORG2 on The Squid List.) This tribe of idealists, an ethnic group long thought to be extinct, is attempting to change an arts funding system they believe to be broken with the only primitive tools they have: idealism, kindness, the world wide web, transparency, beer and enthusiasm. They describe the broken system as failing to incite spectacular art by having a sub-ideal curatorial process, and massively under-funding the effort. BORG2 isn’t going for SFMOMA’s throat, or the City of San Francisco’s Public Art programs. Nope. They’re going after the organizers of that fantastic, if fleeting, city in the desert — Burning Man. And their massive plans to transform arts funding are a bet with the head honcho of Burning Man, Larry Harvey. BORG2 wins, and he’ll seriously consider big changes in arts funding.

In the grand tradition of ethnographers, Ms. Weidinger finds herself on the slippery slope of Participant Observer, and is now running for a seat on the nine-member Art Council. The Art Council is rather like any small town civic arts council — that is if someone threw open the doors and allowed city agencies to compete to serve constituents better. It’s an _alternate_ arts council for Burning Man with plans to speedily raise $250,000 and disperse grants to artists for artwork for Burning Man 2005 through a democratic voting process. With direct grants to individual artists in the U.S. on the decline, BORG2’s plan is downright radical.

Whether you’re a burner or not, BORG2 invites you to participate. (Not surprising from an ethnographic stance, as many members are 30+, and the tribe’s reproductive rates are dropping steadily.) You’re invited to review the candidate’s statements, peruse the FAQ, and attend the live election results party at The Odeon Bar on Wednesday, 1/18/05. Participants and Participant Observers alike are welcomed.

BORG2 Info: www.BORG2.org

BORG2 Discussion: BORG2.tribe.net

BORG2 Art Fund Donations: www.BORG2.org/Donate.html

Directions to the Odeon: www.odeonbar.com

The official list of eligible candidates for both Art Council and Curator
www.borg2.org/ArtCouncil.html

www.borg2.org/GuestCurator.html

The BORG2 Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQ: www.BORG2.org/FAQ.html

Princess Frillypants Productions with Anon Salon presents “Wishing Well”, a benefit for tsunami relief, Wednesday, January 12th at Mighty in San Francisco.

Ask Dr. Hal takes place every Wednesday night at The Odeon Bar in San Francisco.

Simone sums it up quite well:

Ask Dr. Hal Show can be see every single solitary week (except when they don’t feel like it) at the Odeon Bar at Mission and Valencia (yes they do) in San Francisco.

Hal and Chicken sit up onstage and are bombarded with sealed envelopes containing questions from the audience. Chicken opens and reads the question, and Hal answers the question in his inimitable Hal way.

If the necessary honorarium included with the question is sufficient, the audience is treated to a Bardic Recitation of Hal’s Choice. Once someone gave fifty buck and Hal recited, in its entirety, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, from memory, with all the voices, bringing the bar to a shrieking collapse upon his completion.

Anyhow the show is every wednesday around Nineish pm at The Odeon Bar; On the First Wednesday of every month Chicken gets the bus out and we all go bowling after the show. We pretty much just load the entire bar into the bus and take off for Daly City. It’s great.

Pete Goldie offers up these additional reasons to attend:

Challenge Dr. Hal to a Mental Wrestling Match… and Lose!

Come see KROB wear his Happy Jammies on Stage!

Witness YoYo King David Cappuro Crawl Inside Chicken John’s Head… WITHOUT LEAVING A MARK!

Marvel at the Gargantuan Special Effects of Diminutive Soundman Jascha!

Fight Back the Gag Reflex as You Down Fernet-Branca!

Here are some photos from Ask Dr. Hal from 7/30/03 & 2/16/05

Harry S. Robins aka Hal Robins aka Dr. Hal, namesake of the weekly “Ask Dr. Hal” series at The Odeon Bar and Master of Church Secrets” for The Church of SubGenius, has written and illustrated a wonderful new book: “The Meaning of Lost and Mismatched Socks”.

From Frog, Ltd., the publisher:

Meaning of Lost and Mismatched Socks is a humorous examination of why one of a pair of socks disappears during the process of laundering them, from a quasi-scientific perspective, with many theoretical, historical and contemporary asides.

Here’s what Hal says about the book:

I, Dr. Hal, have written a book. It’s called “The Meaning of Lost and Mismatched Socks”, and its publisher is Frog, Ltd. (North Atlantic Books). This tome was written, indexed, and packed with illustrations by Yours Truly under the nom de plume of Dr. Perditus Pedale, M.D., Ph.D., but don’t be fooled: it’s really me. (”Cyberpunk” author) John Shirley wrote it up with a good review last year, bless him.

From the Rooftops to the Medicine Chest, its the The A+B Surreal Medicine Show, featuring Attaboy + Burke and the Parts Unknown Drum and Bass Band.

Saturday, January 8th, 2005
Saturday, February 5th, 2005
Saturday, March 5th, 2005

All shows are at The Odeon Bar and start at 9:00pm. Here’s more info.

Proudly Sponsored by the Sinister Laughing Squid.

Check out the santarchy.com archives for a run down of all of all the cities that hosted Santacons in December 2004. By my count there was at least 21, including some un-Christmas like activity in Auckland, NZ.

photo credit: Ray Olivares