April Winchell

So last night, the lovely and talented Al Segundo (a loyal advertiser on the site for lo these many years) sent me to a site called elfyourself. It’s a little holiday thing put together by Office Max, and it lets you upload a picture and create an anmated gif of yourself as a dancing elf. You can even record a greeting, and make the mouth move.

I must have played with this thing for an hour.

So here you go. This is me, as a dancing elf.

I look great, don’t I? I never thought of myself as a Winter before, but the jewel tones are clearly working for me. And I’m rocking the striped tights.

So go do one, will you? It’s free!

Santa’s Sack of Crap

It looks like I’m going to have a very large steaming pile of audio for your Christmas enjoyment by the middle of next week!

I can’t say too much because I don’t want to give anything away. But if all goes well, there will be a little bonus treat for you all , from me to you.

In the meantime, I have uploaded last week’s show with Mr. KABC, courtesy of our good friend Roger. Thank you Roger, for your continuing support. A big bottele of Vicodin and a map of L.A. freeways autographed by Nicole Richie is on its way.

Check the archives for the December 8th show.

I will also be adding a big stack of hideous Christmas music to the Multimedia section over the course of the day, and I’ll let you all know when it’s up and ready to enhance that holiday feeling.

In the meantime, enjoy this new addition to the pile, courtesy of the delicious Mr. Otis Fodder.

The Chinese Kids Choir: Hark the Herald Angels Sing

R.I.P. Linkapalooza

Well, this makes me kind of sad.

When I started this site almost 5 years ago, I included a section I called Linkapalooza.

It was just a page where people could add anything that amused them. I didn’t edit the links, or even look at them, really. I just set up the page so that only 50 could be seen at one time, and when another was added, the oldest link would drop off.

Eventually, I did have to start policing the page a little. I hated to do it, but every once in a while, some jackass would abuse the page by spamming it, or flooding all the links with porn.

I created a filter to keep the horse blowjob shots out, and to keep spammers at bay. The filter learned as we went along, and got better at it, and for while, I thought we could all live in harmony.

Then a new virus came along, in the form of a frustrated musician and web host, who simply could not be content with an occasional mention on this site. He needed to be on Linkapalooza all day, every day. He made it his mission. I really don’t know why.

I wrote to him many times, asking him to keep his links to one a week. He ignored me, doubling his efforts. There were days when every link went to his site, and worse, to the same page on his site, so that the reader would get his home page over and over again. I got emails of complaint many times, as people felt duped by the links. I even got notes of sympathy from other web hosts, who had also suffered his spamming of forums and comment boards.

I decided to just monitor the page as much as possible, and keep his links to a bare minimum.

Last week, however, the ante was raised in a way that made me very uncomfortable.

He changed the design of his home page. He took my colors, my layout, my format, and mirrored the look as much as his skills would allow. The result might have lead a visitor to think they were still on my site, and that was one step too far.

It’s a shame, really, because our sensibilities are similar in some areas, and I would have been happy to feature him here from time to time. But this crosses a line, and has turned the whole thing very sour.

So in the spirit of Christmas, thank you for ruining a fun thing for everyone. I’d mention you by name, but it’s just so much more fun not to.