One of the problems I have to deal with when it comes to the site is that I can't really talk about a lot of what I pick up or happens to come my way. Talking about them would cause a lot of trouble without much being gained, and you need to be doing things for the right reasons -- not for recognition or page hits or selling swag, rather those things are a means to an end.
Every once in awhile, my head starts blocking, because my head works weird, and some of my days just are weird. As in, those days where its late in the evening after a full day and you're grinding on blog stuff, and a napkin slides your way that Steve Jobs is in Fiji, most probably on vacation. Then someone at a company leaks to someone else at another company, and another napkin slides your way saying AOL is going to lay off 700+ employees in week, or about 10% of their work force.
The AOL thing is an example of something that causes my head to start blocking. It's news, as no one else really knew about it yet, but at the same time, it's people.
posted on October 21, 2005 at 01:26 AM
I just returned from a long weekend in Seattle. I've attached a couple of shots of The Cow accompanying us on our obligatory tourists' visit to the Space Needle. Sorry about the quality of the photos. Apparently, those rumors of Seattle being a drizzly place are not overstated. Despite the weather, we had a great time - Seattle's one hell of a town! Next month, we depart for a week-long dive trip to Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras. I hope to surpass my Cozumel pics, so stay tuned ...Cheers,
Jay
Seattle is a very cool town, but you shouldn't have even mentioned Honduras Cow, as now you have my hopes up, and I'll be super disappointed if it doesn't happen...
The Cow you can wear is finally here, or at least is officially on its way -- just click the shirt. Available via pre-order for the next few weeks only, The Cowch Shirt comes in four colors:
- Black
- Forest Green
- Chocolate
- Navy
The color selection is only possible due to pre-ordering, which means while The Cowch may be available in limited quantities in the future, it will only be as a single shirt color. I want to keep the pre-order round as short as possible, as you guys have already been patient as hell.
Other things to know...
Ah, Hawaii. Kind of hard to think of a better way to spend a lazy Saturday. Warm sun, blue ocean, sandy beaches, girls with the brown eyes and coconut bikinis, and cocktails heavy on the rum.
And now, an inebriated Cow...
Matthew Schinckel passed on this shot from the AppleCentre Next Byte in Australia. Specifically, the one in Adelaide at Rundle Mall. Apparently he turned on the iSight and caught himself in it...
To my untrained eye, still looks like he was endeavoring to get the back of the sales girl into it. One day, there's going to have to be a coffee table book of these, so keep being creative.
A reader of the site named Dirk happens to be employed at a large Apple Reseller in Europe, works lonely hours, and is surrounded by broken iPods. Add in The Cow, and you get...
Another Apple Store has been tagged...
I couldn't make it to the Shibuya store when it opened on the 6th (I was in Hiroshima for the peace ceremony), but you get the Shinsaibashi store instead. At least it has the same spiral staircase.In the second picture, you can see the desktop was still unchanged when I left the store after browsing for a while. When I went back later in the day to catch the concerts, it was already replaced. Oh well.
Hao Ye
I'm so down with the Shibuya store...
Aha, if you look close, there it is at the first computer. This one really made me smile, because:
- Hao is one of my few readers from Japan that I'm aware of, and that's just cool. [Hao has informed me he's Chinese by birth and living in Japan]
- The desktop he chose to use is one from the covercasts, but not the public one. It's the one I just gave out to those who helped, so he had to have trucked that out with him en leu of one of the standards. You can find Hao on disc one.
I have to say, it's a little strange to be throwing up a post that includes "Hiroshima", "peace ceremony" and "The Cow", but not in a bad way.
Thanks, Hao.
A few days ago, the above dropped into my inbox from a certain Mr. Wil Shipley which had me roundly amused yet confused, and I had to backtrack to an older conversation where he mentioned he knew a girl who made plushy things out of socks and such. And now, a few hours ago, this dropped into my Inbox labeled "Version 2"...
My precious. Version 3 may well have to be setup for a production run.
Apparently the new vogue is, while browsing through an Apple Store, to use its provided internet access to download one of DrunkenBlog Desktops and set them as the computer's background, then snap a pic. I'm sure it raises some eyebrows, which makes it highly amusing.
This one is from the Tysons Corner Apple Store in Virginia...
This one is from the The Woodlands Apple Store in Texas...
drunkenbatman, I intended to get a shot of The Cow on a 30" monitor. However, given the fact that 1) for some unknown reason, they had their flagship monitor shoved in a corner, and 2) an Apple employee was asking whether I needed assistance every 15 seconds, this seemed the more prudent course. I'll forward more pics of the opening later."
What's sad is that he did send these the day the store opened, and if you have any idea of when the Apple Store opened, you'll have an idea of how behind I am. My inbox taunts me. I'm not being a jerk, just a bit laggy.
My girlfriend and I took The Cow with us on our holiday to Stockholm, I took several digital photos but for some reason some didn't store on the memory card but saying that two of the best shots did work :)
"A wooden horse in Stockholm's city hall. They have them in every tourist shop (albeit much smaller versions of this one). They are hand carved and painted. Apparently if you buy two you get good luck, don't know if thats true or if the shop keeper was trying to get us to buy more!"
"Outside the Swedish parliament and palace. The guard wouldn't hold The Cow up for us :( and we couldn't get any closer than we did."
So very, very cool. I just love these things. As a side note, for liability reasons, I am not encouraging readers to approach and ask people holding automatic weapons to pose with The Cow.
Awhile ago, I got the above card in my inbox (It's been hinted I'm a fan of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as well as the soundtrack, which is recommended listening for the duration of this post), along with The Cow with a speedo, along with a note that our drunken mascot would be taken along on a scuba diving trip in Cozumel, Mexico.
With a little help from the self-service laminating desk at the nearest FedEx/Kinkos, I was able to take The Cow to about 80' below.Look at this as my little (slightly demented) way to say thank you to you. The blogosphere could use a lot more posters who put the thought, energy and reasoning that you do behind their posts before hitting the "blog it" button.
There is a very unique blend of absurdity and charm in this one... Yes, Jay actually laminated The Cow, then took him scuba diving (and other places) along with a camera. Fire up your Seu Jorge...
I've joked lately about my lack of girly readers, but there are a few. One in Canada, who we'll just call CG due to stalking issues, apparently took my clarion call as an opportunity to actually make some white russians, and from what follows, I can only assume she'd consumed more than one before she set out to document her tribute.
I started to pick and choose, and then realized it was so much easier to just run them all through ThumbScrew (ThumbScrew isn't perfect yet, but Adobe's Creative Suite is just giving me no love under Mac OS 10.4, and it's been a lifesaver for these) and throw them online...
Just about caught up with my backlog of submitted stuff, and this time we have two gifts from California, one from Kansas, and one from New Hampshire. There are two that don't include The Cow, and while alcohol is also a mascot of the site, I can't knock their areas off the global list...
I mentioned that I'm just a lil backlogged on a bunch of the Cow stuff, and am trying to catch up a bit on them. Many that I've posted recently have been outside of the USA, but our favorite drunken bovine is still making the rounds in the backyard of the USA, notably with one of my endangered female readers, and this time on a road trip along Route 66. There's a clue as to which part in one of the images...
So, the guy who actually designed The Cow took a trip to Italy a little while ago, and took along:
- A digital camera.
- The Cow printed out on some card stock.
I had to do a double-take to see The Cow-that-isn't-a-cow in a few, but he's there in all of them... I also believe this is the first submission of The Cow that has incorporated nudity, but at least he was equal-opportunity about it.
Mmmm, Venus.
The other day I was watching the news while I ate dinner, and saw that they were doing that whole running-with-the-bulls thing in Spain. You know, where a bunch of people who have lost the will to live put themselves between a bunch of bulls running down narrow streets on their way to an arena. When I got back, I had to laugh out loud when I had this waiting for me:
There's no wifi for free or to buy in this entire damn country so i dont know when this will leave my outbox, but its wednesday the 13th @ 930pm. I figured I'd try and show my appreciation for the work you have done for your readers all 12 of us in a way I could.Had a print out of the cow, and Keith ran with it on his shirt and I put mine on the outside of my 'whacking' newspaper. gotta show my cow colors, represent yo.
Matt, of the washington in spain matts
Yeah, two guys traveling in Spain wore The Cow while they ran with the bulls, sent photographic evidence, and confused some French guy to boot. Oh, the irony. I'm still undecided as to whether these guys were or weren't doing America's image overseas any favors...
Several days ago, I got this amusing letter from a reader, in relation to him running around a city in Israel with The Cow and a digital camera:
Going anywhere near an Israeli military base with a camera would probably get me arrested, if not shot, on sight, so this is about the coolest I could do.Next time I'm in Jerusalem I'll have to take The Cow and steal a friend's digital camera (again), and try to get a picture with some holy sites in the background. You can imagine the coolness factor.
Anyway, you can cross Israel off the list, if you haven't had the chance to already. Thanks for all of your great writing, and for putting all the hard work you do into the blog. Cheers!
Jon R. from Ra'anana, Israel
The Cow isn't in all of these, but it's in enough, and I like all the others. Click for larger...
Awhile ago, I mentioned in an off-hand way that someone in the Canadian Air Force had embarked on a quest to get The Cow in places he should probably never ever be. Well, he pulled it off.
Unfortunately, he has to be very careful about details, so we're going to have to call him 'drunkensoldier'. Be sure to give this guy some love, as I'm still too dumbstruck to gush appropriately. Click for larger...
"Ever since I saw that post about taking the Cow places I've been trying to think of where to take it…I mean, there's so many interesting places. You almost got a shot of the Cow at the sign for One Infinite Loop, but I would have had to get past a bunch of Japanese tourists who were piling off of a bus to take each other's pics at the sign.So then it hit me: Cool old computers. Well, I think they're cool... I'm a computer history buff, and jumped at the chance to go to the Computer History Museum. So the Cow (and my laptop) came along..."
For the record, old computers are cool. An inspired choice, and I'm thoroughly inspired, and Cap'n Hector was nice enough to annotate what's what.
Hi drunkenbatman!Yesterday I went on a tour with my bike. Remembering your call for pictures of the cow I decided to take the cow with me. :) My Powerbook chickened out of touring on bike, so I had to take a cow-hardcopy with me.
We went to the Zeche Zollverein industrial site which is in the UNESCO list of "world heritage" sites.
Joel Gerhold
Very funny, and very, very cool. The Cow looks great printed out. Germany can now be officially struck off the list, although there's certain room for something involving Oktoberfest.
So back when I first posted desktop pictures of The Cow, I said "feel free to get creative". A reader in Houston, TX, took me up on it by downloading The Cow and printing him out.
And then cutting it into masks. And then making his family wear them, while documenting it with a really crappy digital camera. I have some great ones from Germany to post, but nothing like this.
After wigging out a bit with David, I passed them onto a few people for reactions, the most common being: "That's one chainsaw short of a horror movie." The Cow was always supposed to be a bit off, but I can always count on my readers to rub things till they have a nice glossy shine of disturbing.
So, people have been asking about the desktop picture in the screenshot a few posts ago. It's part of the 'DrunkenBlog Lame-o Gift Pack', which is handed out to someone who donates to the site in some way as a small way of saying thanks. Like what was sent out to the mirrors is just for them, as it being just for them is the only thing giving it whatever small value it has.
However, it's time for The Cow to spread his wings a bit, and I owe my readers in general a lot of thanks. You not only read, you're patient, give feedback, and spread The Werd. Hell, without those dropping typos my way who knows what half my posts would look like.
So please accept my thanks, along with six DrunkenBlog Desktops: five pieces of Cow Candy, and an alcoholic treat.
Wide-screen and full-screen versions are included to match whatever aspect ratio your screen might be, and if this whole Cow business is confusing you you'll probably want to backtrack and see who created it and why.
Feel free to email screen snaps along with the name of your city, as I find it amusing. If you have a digi, actual pictures of The Cow gracing a computer are highly amusing, so feel free to get creative. Major points for anything with a recognizable landmark in the picture to document the spread of The Cow, with mad props for anything from a campus in Cupertino or Redmond.
Just for the record, while I would be amused, I am not telling you to go walking around an Apple Store or Best Buy applying The Cow on desktops like Johnny Appleseed, so don't get yourself into trouble.
Say hello to the new Cow of DrunkenBlog.
The Cow has evolved -- and fully come into its own -- which means the former Cow must step aside and quietly slink off into retirement. It's not without its sorrow, but before the next big post goes live, this post will be the final resting place of the former Cow.
