About two months ago I did a minor overhaul of this site’s design. I called it a redesign, but it didn’t really involve much more than moving some elements from one place to another.

But this, this, my friends, is a redesign. I’ll still be tweaking some things, but it’s mostly done. Everything appears to be working fine on my end. If you notice anything that seems to be broken, you might drop me a line: hearst [at] nyc.rr.com.

More soon. If you recognize the quote that’s currently running underneath the main header, you are cool and I like you.

UPDATE, 10:15 a.m.: Everything looked fine when I tested the redesign in four or five browsers in Mac OS X last night. I’m now at work and looking at the site in Mozilla for Mac OS 9, and a handful of elements are off by a few pixels. Not sure if I’ll bother to try to figure out how to fix these minor issues so the layout completely works in Mozilla/Netscape. It looks fine in Internet Explorer 5.1 for OS 9. For those of you keeping score at home.

I got out of work at 3 on Friday and had no plans for the rest of the afternoon, so I wandered down to Union Square to catch a 4:40 showing of The Aristocrats, which I’d been meaning to see for weeks. It’s hilarious. If you like movies in which famous comedians tell stories about parents fisting their children and entire families wallowing naked in their own bodily fluids, this is the film for you.

Anyway, about 15 or 20 minutes in, there’s a short scene in which five or six Onion writers sit around a conference room and analyze the dirty joke that is the subject of the film. As the scene begins, the camera is focused on a pile of stuff on the conference table. One of the most prominent things on the pile is the front page of an issue of The Onion. As I watched the slow pan up the table, it took me a second or two to realize that the Onion issue onscreen was the very issue whose cover story—“Non-Controversial Christ Painting Under Fire From Art Community”—I posed for several years ago. I’m right there onscreen for a good three or four seconds before the camera pans up from the table. Here’s the picture that accompanied the story; that’s me in front, wearing an ill-fitting jacket that makes me look twice as big—okay, maybe one and a half times as big—as I actually am.

And so I take my rightful place alongside comedy geniuses like Jon Stewart, Eric Idle, Sarah Silverman, and Taylor Negron.

Here is a video file of the South Park version of the Aristocrats joke as it appears in the film. Completely and utterly not safe for work, so take any appropriate precautions.

Zachary Vex is a music engineer and electronics fetishist whose unique effects pedals and tiny amps have earned him the adulation of discerning music-gear fanatics around the world. His little company, the Minneapolis-based Z. Vex, is best known for its hand-assembled and hand-painted effects pedals, many of which are designed to produce beautifully sick low-fi sounds. A year or two ago Z. Vex expanded into the world of amplifiers with the Nano Head, the world’s smallest tube guitar amp, which fits in the palm of your hand. When coupled with a speaker cabinet, the Nano Head is capable of some excellent AC/DC-style crunch.

Now Z. Vex has announced its latest product: the iMP AMP, a stereo vacuum-tube power amplifier “intended for studio use, or with small sound sources such as iPods, mini-disc/cd players and laptops to power passive monitors. Perfect for your office or recording environment—you can put the iMP AMP right on your desk with bookshelf speakers and have a mini tube hi-fi setup for your iPod.”

Unless you have lots of disposable income, you probably won’t be buying an iMP AMP anytime soon: The retail price is $525. But I’m sure it sounds great, and the retro-futuristic design is beautiful. It almost looks like a discarded prop from the set of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Here are some more details from the e-mail Zachary Vex sent out last week:

It’s a hi-fidelity stereo vacuum tube power amplifier designed to power passive speakers (like old-fashioned bookshelf speakers or studio monitors like Yamaha NS-10s or JBL L100s, or even high-end audiophile speakers.) It’s one watt per side, with RCA input connectors, barrier-strip output speaker terminals, and adjustable sensitivity so the iMP is compatible with any standard level, from +4dB (studio level) to -20dB (consumer gear like the iPod.) It’s slightly smaller than the Nano head because it doesn’t have a fan. […] Its frequency response is nothing short of amazing, at +0dB/-2dB from 10 Hz to 22kHz.

I’m really thrilled with this amp. I use it at my desk, where it takes up very little space and is plenty loud to fill my office with sound. I have another one driving my old JBLs at my lab bench, where we listen to all of the CDs we receive from players using our products! There’s one more in my living room with a Clearaudio Basic phono preamp feeding it, driving my Monitor Audio Golds. It makes my old Zep records sound just like 1971, man.

My favorite Z. Vex pedal is the Seek Wah, which functions like an array of sequencer-triggered wah-wah pedals. If you have no idea what that might mean, or you just want to see the Seek Wah in action, there is a video demo on the Z. Vex site, complete with charmingly geeky commentary from Zachary Vex himself. It’s an amazingly cool gadget.

As Matt Haber observed last week, the cover of Radar’s September/October issue was art directed by George Lois, the advertising genius who created dozens of classic Esquire covers between 1962 and 1972. The new Radar cover is a parody of a Lois Esquire creation that caused a big controversy in early 1968.

Here’s what no one’s noticed yet: For some time now, George Lois has been happily recycling his old Esquire covers for a bunch of other magazines. The one below is on the newsstand right now. Click on the image to see the Lois original.

[This post originally contained two more George Lois riffs, but I don’t think they worked as well as the one above, so I took them down…]

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

In 1986, at the peak of the PMRC’s prohibitionist campaign against all pop music it judged to be insufficiently banal, Frank Zappa appeared on CNN’s Crossfire to talk about obscenity and censorship with three other panelists. One of those three other panelists was Mr. Douchebag of Liberty himself, co-host Robert Novak, who has learned a thing or two about obscenity in recent days.

Zappa is so great in this. The clip is about 20 minutes long, and the whole thing is worth watching.

Novak is actually the good cop in this exchange. The bad cop role is played with great gusto by a pharisaical right-winger—is there any other kind?—named John Lofton.

Zappa appeared on Crossfire again the following year, but that clip isn’t quite as rewarding.

That primary-colored magazine you’ve seen floating out of your local newsstand this past week is the American debut of OK!, a lighter-than-air British import filled with sundry piffle about various B- and C-list celebrities. More interesting than anything inside the magazine is the three-word phrase that runs along the top of the cover:

It’s certainly a premiere issue. And if you’re comfortable postulating the existence of a human being who keeps a permanent stash of landfill-destined celebrity magazines, I suppose you could also call it a collector’s issue. But “Premiere Collector’s Issue”? The phrase can only mean two things: “an issue for premiere collectors” or “the first in a series of collector’s issues.” It might literally be true that this issue marks the beginning of a sequence of OK! collector’s issues, but I’m pretty confident that’s not what the editors were intending to proclaim: “Hey, all you collector’s issue lovers, check it out! Have we got a collector’s issue for you! And if you love this debut collector’s issue, you’ll also enjoy our future collector’s issues, which are forthcoming!”

I follow sports about as much as I follow, say, the shenanigans of Paris Hilton—which is to say, very little. But between the ages of nine and roughly thirteen, I was a typical baseball-obsessed American boy. I watched This Week in Baseball every weekend during the season, and I also loved a goofy kids’ show called The Baseball Bunch, which was hosted by Johnny Bench and the San Diego Chicken. The San Diego Chicken!

In 1981, at the height of my Fernando Valenzuela-stoked baseball fixation, a singer named Terry Cashman had a minor hit with a novelty song called “Talkin’ Baseball (Willie, Mickey and the Duke),” a nostalgic ode to Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, and 1950s baseball in general. I’m sure I would find this song deeply irritating if I heard it today, but back then I loved it. I wanted to own a copy of the 45, but I couldn’t find it in any local stores.

At the time I was an enthusiastic subscriber to Baseball Digest, a compact little magazine stuffed with profiles, predictions, and statistical analysis; much of the content was syndicated from various major and midsize newspapers. I wrote to the magazine to ask the editors if they could help me locate a copy of the Cashman disc. When I opened up the April 1982 issue, I discovered that my excellent letter was in it.

I’m not sure if the incorrect restrictive comma before the song title was my fault or theirs, but the same error exists in their response, too, so I’m going to blame it on them.

Here’s the cover of that issue:

Much to my surprise, Baseball Digest still exists. I have a box filled with all my old issues from the late ’70s and early ’80s; if I still cared about baseball, I’m sure they’d be fun to look through, but, um, I don’t really care.

A 1992 episode of The Simpsons featured a parody of Cashman’s song called “Talkin’ Softball,” and it was sung by Cashman himself. You can listen to it here.