Cora, Bonzi and I are back from the road trip to Little Rock, Arkansas. One highlight of the trip (well, for me at least, and I stress the "me" part) was a visit to the old landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

At this point, .002% of you find this exciting, the other 99.998% of you think I'm a nutter and that Cora is the most patient girl on Earth.

Although the photograph only shows weeds, the humanclock cardboard, and a lonely tire; what you don't see are the 10 to 20 tractor-trailer loads of Atari games buried in the ground below.

Flashback to about 1981, I was in the third grade and had an Atari 2600. It ruled. A few years later I somewhat remember my Uncle telling me that if I wanted more games for it, he read something about Atari dumping a bunch of games in the New Mexico desert, maybe I could go dig them up. I was eight years old and could not drive. I got a Tandy 100SX Computer a few years later, no more Atari. Time went on.

I got back into Atari games during the mid 1990's and remembered the urban legend of the buried games. I could not locate any details on the games other than they "were buried in concrete in the New Mexico desert." I told my filmmaker friend Jeff that this would make a good non-fiction Indiana Jones-ish sort of film. We both forgot about it and life continued on.

Now that the Internet has matured a bit and more people have taken the time to research odd little things like this, the story of Atari games in the New Mexico desert is actually true after all. Back in 1983, Atari took several tractor-trailer loads worth of cartridges and dumped them at the city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The "goods" were crushed and had concrete poured overtop of them. You can read the whole story here (overview) and here [link expired] . A band named Wintergreen even picked up the ball and used the whole saga as the subject of a music video.

Cora and I drove in circles a couple times until we found the landfill. The landfill is basically a huge field behind a bunch of strip-mall businesses on the edge of town. I told Cora I'd be gone a few minutes and she made me rephrase it to "I'll come back at some point." I wandered around the ravines until I found an area that looked somewhat like the area in the newspaper photograph. (from the links above). I took a few photos/clock photos and did my best to "take it in".

I told my Father about the dump adventure a few days later, his only response was "Hmm, you still remember how to hitchhike don't you? It sounds like you are going to be forced to do it soon."

Hey, photo updates coming soon. Cora, Bonzi, and I are in Artesia, NM right now. I'm looking for a shovel so when we get to Alamogordo I can dig up all those Atari games in the landfill (might be busy for awhile). Have a good New Year!

When all else fails, go for dogs and skateboards. This weekend I had to come up with a photo for a charity book project. I tried various intentionally arty/pretentious things but those weren't working out.

There is a guy in my neighborhood who flies down my street on his skateboard while being towed by his dog. He has the dog leash in one hand and a six pack of cheap beer in the other. It is so cute you want to cry.

Instead of the beer, I took the humanclock cardboard and had Bonzi give me a tow. Bonzi would grab the leash with his mouth and start pulling on me. Cora snapped photos while we would head straight for her, nearly knocking her over a couple times. After about 2 gigs of photos, we ended up with some good photos and a tired dog.

Came across this photo the other day from August 2003 when looking for something else. This was right after I got back from Australia. My friend Kevin and I biked from Oregon to Burning Man in western Nevada, that was quite a time. One of my best memories was when we were biking though the Nevada desert at night. The stars were out and it was warm. Every 30 minutes a car would pass us and give a honk of approval. At one point Kevin said "Man, I wish one of these cars would stop and give us a beer." About 30 seconds later a converted school bus (not hippie, a blinging-decked-out one) passed us. The brake lights come on and the bus rolls to a stop. A guy gets out and says "HEY! You guys want a beer?" After food/drinks, we ended up biking until about 3am and slept off the side of the road.

In the present time (October 25, 2006), the site should be running at full speed again. The servers have been a bit overloaded lately and such.

And then by lucky chance I saw in a special magazine that Andy Summers was going to be at Powell's bookstore. Cora thought the book would make a good Christmas present for her mom (uh, hello Anne!). When Cora got the book signed she asked Andy to write the time in the book and I got a photo of that. Later after most of the people had left I gave Andy a card and told him about why we had wanted the time in the book. Media Woman Halle was standing nearby and had seen this site. I ended up taking a photo of her and Andy together.



And if that wasn't enough, yesterday my friends Karen and MCQ took a clock photo with Georgia Hubley, the drummer from Yo La Tengo (check her out getting checked out at 2:09m):


In other news I've spent the last week moving this entire site to new servers. I have most of the issues worked out except for one, which explains why the images load a bit slow during rush hour (eg when people are viewing this site at work). This should hopefully be fixed pretty soon.

Hanging out at George's house.

New York City, NY!

Nice Girl Cora and Drummer Guy Colin in front of the building that is the cover of Led Zeppelin's album Physical Graffiti. This is also where the Rolling Stones' "Waiting on a Friend" video was filmed.

Going to New York City next month to take heaps of clock photos. That is my garage in the background that I was scraping/painting all last month, when I should have probably been fixing bugs on this website instead.

"Webserver's on fire...
better throw it in the water." - The nerdy Brian Eno

The server is going to be slow the next few days. Humanclock.com was on Time Magazine's 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 list. Maybe I should stop painting my house and actually get back to working on the 8,200 things I have to do to this site.

Desolation Peak in the North Cascades of Washington.

Jack Kerouac spent a couple months here in 1956 as a fire lookout.

I got a chunk of the backed up clock photos into the site, the rest will go in soon. I was gone all last week kayaking with my Dad at Ross Lake. (cue Harry Chapin music).

Greetings from FoHo
So like, as this British bloke David Jones would say something about "five years" on his famous album about some guy name Ziggy Stardust.....the clock site celebrated it's fifth (yes, five) year anniversary on June 16th. yay. Oh, that is Sir Bonzi Wells and Cora of "Orange Cora" (the color you have grown (known?) to love) above.

Yet again I'm behind on submissions. I've been painting the garage all week cause I'm having a 500 day housewarming party next week. I will get them in after I get back from a wedding on the coast. (note to US Weekly: not mine)

Here is a great submission from Pickerington, Ohio

Thanks to Cub Scout Pack 1147!

Thank you Fargo South High School in Fargo, North Dakota!

Every once in awhile something comes along that looks like it might have been a bit of a logistical nightmare to coordinate. There are a few other photos like this, but I think this one breaks the record for the most amount of people in it. Hats off to Fargo South High School. There are even more people in this photo than my entire high school class. (Ugh, it has been awhile for me: Camaros, "cassette tapes", and Skid Row just aren't cool anymore)

No longer will you have to put up with the standards of another culture!

It took me nearly five years to spend nearly five hours of my time on the website, but humanclock.com now supports a 24 hour clock format!

Americans can stop complaining that they don't know what time "16:14" represents, and Europeans can stop complaining that they don't like "4:14pm". Now our nations can live in harmonious isolation again.

Now you can have the option to show photos in 12 hour format, 24 hour format (when available), or both formats. There is a new option on the clock page for changing your time format, you should be able to figure it out.

12 hour format - Things really don't follow any sort of logic and you can get confused. If someone tells you to "meet you at twelve", you have no idea if they meant 12 midnight or 12 noon. How many hours are between 2:00am and 9pm? You have to stop and think. On the upside for computer programmers, dealing with this complicated time format means more billable hours!

24 hour format - Other than the simple fact that you can take 21:00 and subtract 2:00 from it and quickly know the answer to the question in the last paragraph, by far the biggest advantage to this time format is that you can finally break out that Rush 2112 album out of the closet and send me a clock photo.

Yeah, ok, there is a good story in here...

Kris Kristofferson was in town this week, playing a solo-acoustic show at the really intimate Aladdin Theater. The theater is famous for apparrently holding the world record for the most consecutive showings of the 1972 adult film Mark Felt. (not the real title, read your history kiddies and the last sentence will be funny).

We had been in line since around 5:30pm. Karen and my girlfriend Christeena had marked off a section of "their" sidewalk with duct tape. I think we were the youngest people there. Around 6:45pm, Karen and I walked behind the theater to put our bags into her car. I mentioned to Karen about how I was losing my touch, since I had no clock making tools with me. As we are walking back, an older SUV drives towards us. Looking at the SUV straight on I can see the profile of Kris Kristofferson in the passenger seat. Karen goes to the left, I walk to the right of the SUV as it passes between us. I look at Karen, she looks at me and says:


"I know", I reply. Karen runs to the back of the theater and I'm already running down the sidewalk in front. Christeena is talking to some people in the line with her back to me. Not wanting to make a big announcement, I grab her by the arm and start running. She spun around and saw it was only me trying to abduct her from the line, so that could only mean one thing. We got to the back of the theater just as Kris was getting out of the SUV. I simply took photographs while the three girls acted like a gaggle of teenagers waiting outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in 1964 to meet The Beatles.

Kris said he was in a hurry but would sign Karen's record and pose for a couple photos. We went back to our spot in line. After seeing the above photo on my camera, all the women around us in the line starting acting like a gaggle of teenagers waiting outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in 1964 to meet The Beatles.

The show was quite memorable. Karen has this thing where she hands a cheap plastic pinwheel flower to people at concerts. She has a nice collection of photos with Beck, Willie Nelson, Bono, Janet Weiss, ?uestlove, and David Byrne. She had written "Pilgrim 33" on the flower and put it on the stage. Kris was plugged in and such and couldn't walk over to pick it up, but during the intermission somone came out and picked up the flower. During the second set Kris started playing "The Pilgrim; Chapter 33". The girls got all excited (Ibid, Beatles Analogy). Near the end of the song Kris looked at Karen and said "I read your flower". He said something else but I couldn't hear it. (Ibid, Beatles Analogy).

So no clock photo for me, but we all had some good memories from that night.