Garden Of Blog

If you’re stopping into our homepage at mindmined.com for the first time in awhile, you may notice things have changed a bit. Garden of Blog and CozmiKast are now part of the regular news stream.

We’re still adding to the Mind Mined archive proper, but now the mother ship is current with the latest text and audio feeds from our Web 2.0 endeavours: your editor’s personal blog, and the podcast we started back in October of 2005.

I hope you enjoy the new presentation of Mind Mined!

-Marcus

Some of you may know that I am a founding member of the seminal psychedelic band Cozmik Corkscrew. We rock.

Well it turns out that moving to Alton, New Hampshire some years ago has brought me to one of the corkscrew’s most historic places. William Rockwell Clough moved his corkscrew manufacturing to Factory Street (now Gilman Road) in 1903, and the company proceeded to crank out more than a billion corkscrews about 5 miles from where our home sits now.

In 1904, “Clough married his second wife Nellie Sophia Place, daughter of George Place, an Alton lumber dealer and businessman” according to chapter four of William Rockwell Clough, a book by Ron MacClean. This is all from that book, including the image of the corkscrews to the right. Look closely: yup, those miniature corkscrew samples are from Alton. There’s a lot more Alton stuff at the end of chapter four (scroll down) in MacLean’s book.

In other Alton/corkscrew synchronicity news, you may be familiar with Alton Towers, a huge amusement park in the U.K. In 1980 it added a rollercoaster called The Corkscrew which was the first coaster to invert in Britain.

Do skip on over to my lovely wife’s newly redesigned blog known worldwide as The Zucchini Patch. Now we’re both on WordPress and happier for it.

I just took the Perl Survey. You should, too, if you use Perl.

This is very cool. Flickr photos, as they are posted, worldwide.

Fans of CozmiKast have long suffered a lack of access to past episodes. Due to the disk space limit on our webhost, we can only offer between 5 and 10 of the latest shows for download at any given time.

The suffering has ended. Thanks to Tim, DynDNS.com, my D-Link router, Damn Small Linux and my old Compaq Armada 1700 that used to run Windows 95, the complete CozmiKast archive is now online. That’s right. All 39 episodes (by latest count) that you can’t get on cozmikast.com. They’re being served up from underneath my audio rack right here in the studio. [NOTE: you can get them on cozmikast.com actually, but they are being hosted from the Archive.]

The power fails often up here in Alton, NH, though, so if the archive is ever down, check back the next day. And thanks for listening to CozmiKast. I know it’s an effort sometimes.

I love compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs).

California could outlaw traditional lightbulbs by 2012 - Jan. 31, 2007

Robert Anton Wilson, immensely loved and influential in the extended countercultural community, died yesterday. Words cannot describe RAW, but he came closer to describing the indescribable in his own writings than anyone before him.

He was the model of the post-dogmatic Individual. I never knew him, but will miss him greatly.

Thanks to RAMROzi for the pointer to these guys. Wait till you have time, and check out the whole 5 minutes of this, in kick-back mode.

Check out this old tune of mine that RAMrozi and I hauled out and recorded. We did a demo of it for the RPM Challenge and later thickened out the horn arrangement and added backing vocals. Jamie from the Rhythm Ship substituted our machine beat with natural drums.

Good old Cozmik Corkscrew lives on. Hopefully soon we’ll get a visit from Black Hoxie, who is rumoured to be working on a “best of” CozmiKast’s 1st year!