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Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

I recently had a friend ask me about electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes (known to their users as personal vaporizers). Actually, lots of people ask me about them. I switched from traditional (“analog”) cigarettes back in August, and basically haven’t smoked since.

Mainly people want to know if they’re cheaper. There’s really no question about whether they’re healthier. They’re not healthy, it’s just that they’re far, far less dangerous. Basically, a traditional cigarette contains thousands of chemicals, a couple dozen or so of which are known carcinogens. The fluid you vaporize in an e-cigarette generally contains just a few ingredients: nicotine (in varying strengths or it may even be absent), food flavoring, and either propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin.

They’re extremely cheaper than regular cigarettes – however, there is an initial buy-in, and you do have to continually purchase replacement parts. I’d say that since August, i’ve spent maybe $200 – $250 in total on supplies. That includes extra parts (batteries, atomizers), fluid (what you “vape”), and accessories (some which i highly recommend having due to the extra convenience, some which are completely unnecessary but make vaping more enjoyable).

On the other hand, i was smoking 1-2 packs a day. One carton of crappy cigarettes in KY costs around $35 right now. That’s well over $100 a month right there, and that’s on the extremely LOW end – in practice, i was actually spending more like $160 a month; in Ohio that would have been over $200 every month! Compare that to the $200 or so i’ve spent on all kinds of crazy vaporizin’ crap in the past FIVE months!

HOWEVER, most people only think they spend $4.50 on cigarettes over the course of their entire lives, because that’s what a single pack costs them right now. Try to convince someone just how much they ACTUALLY spend and they just won’t believe you. But tell them they could spend all that money on something COOL (that still exists after one use), and they might pay a little attention. So, the price to start vaping scares the crap out of most smokers, unless they actually take the time to think about it and compare it to what they actually really spend on cigarettes.

The three etailers i’ve used so far are:
http://cignot.com
http://avejuice.com
http://www.madvapes.com
http://route66vapor.com

I did lots and lots of research and wound up having extremely positive experiences with each one, especially Cignot, who are extraordinarily fast and helpful.

A great starter kit would cost around $35 (that’s for an “unboxed” Joye 510 model from Cignot), and that includes 2 batteries, 2 atomizers, and 5 cartridges, plus a wall charger for the batteries.

Extra batteries for the 510 model are ~$10. Batteries last a couple of hours, so eventually i splurged on a couple of batteries for the Joye eGo model (aka the Riva), which fits onto the 510 atomizer. They cost around $20 each. I just got it today and i can’t seem to make the damn thing die. It’s been well over 12 hours now. Batteries are said to last through around 300 charges or so.

Extra atomizers cost about ~$10. It’s always good to have a few on hand, as this is what makes the whole thing work. Atomizers should last around a month or more if you know how to take care of them. Many people complain that this is a big weak point and they often last just a few weeks before needing replaced. I’ve got a couple that i’ve had since August. It’s kind of a hassle to care for them, but i’m a cheapskate and don’t want to pay more than i have to!

Cartridges don’t really need replacing that often, but you can generally get a 5-pack for around $5 or so. Cartridges contain the fluid, and they need to be constantly refilled, but it’s not much more bother than taking out a cigarette and lighting it, and they should generally last a bit longer than a few cigarettes’ worth of time.

Fluid: this can vary pretty greatly. Expect to pay around $10 for a 10ml bottle, up to around $20 for a 30ml bottle. You can get different strengths of nicotine, and just about any flavor you can imagine (and i’ve seen some really, really weird ones). For me personally, i get ~18-24mg strength nicotine, and a 30ml bottle lasts me maybe a month or so.

As for accessories, i can’t recommend having a Personal Charging Case enough. These suckers will let you leave the house and still be able to charge your spent batteries while you’re on the go. One case can fully charge a battery about 3 times or so. That second battery comes in handy, but i recommend having at least three, unless you go with a big battery like the eGo. Then there are USB chargers, car adapters, and USB “passthroughs” (allowing you to hook up your vaporizer to a USB port and save your battery power). Then there are all the really crazy things like weird parts and add-ons and mod kits and stuff. Anything you can think of, somebody sells one, or the parts to make it yourself.

HOT TIP: never, ever buy from a kiosk at the mall, or in a convenience store. Those things they sell are HORRIBLE. And never get a “disposable” anything, ever. You pretty much have to buy this stuff online for now. Which is a great reason to stock up, because anything you run out of, you have to wait to have shipped!

For lots more information, see http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/

Hope this helps!

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

Here’s a recent discussion i had, or am having, over on Facebook. The gentleman in question apparently lives in my hometown, and (according to his FB profile anyway) graduated from the same school in the same year as me. I don’t remember him, but that’s probably because he was clearly still learning to use the slime he oozes to get around on his own. I’m guessing he was actually home schooled, because even my shitty cow pie-encrusted school would have had a hard time letting this horrifying intellectual vacuum graduate.

Click on the image to get a full-size view. Hopefully this business continues and i’ll be able to add more!

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

On July 27, 2010, Hornbuckle Records is releasing Sometimes You’ve Gotta Fight to Get a Bit of Peace, the brand-new, highly anticipated album by Austin, TX one-man indie rock wrecking crew The Cocker Spaniels. Over three years in the making, this new CD, a masterpiece with a whopping 18 songs – each and every one a soon-to-be classic – could well be the one that blasts head Spaniel and master musician Sean Padilla into the stratosphere, alongside such not-dissimilar artists such as TV on the Radio and indie legends Guided By Voices.

A while back, i emailed Sean to ask how his record was coming. I knew he’d been working on it for a long time and was getting anxious to hear it, being a massive fan of his last CD, the brilliantly-titled Withstand the Whatnot. He sent me a slew of tracks to listen to. This was probably a year or more ago, and he’s been tweaking it ever since, including having it professionally mixed and mastered. I have to say, the album in the form that i heard was insanely good. Then several months ago he sent me a new version, which sounded even better. It is unimaginable to me that the final version could improve upon Sean’s already masterful-sounding recordings and great mixes, and yet all indications are that it will in fact be exactly that.

Now you must understand here that The Cocker Spaniels is not Steely Dan. Their albums are not pristine, cold, surgical affairs devoid of soul. Although the sound is always crisp and clear, with everything in its right place spatially and frequency-wise, the heart and soul of this band is decidedly lo-fi. Not lo-fi in the sense that they were recorded on crappy boomboxes, or even four-track cassette recorders. Rather, it’s the DIY spirit of the things that recall the absolute greatest Guided By Voices records such as Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes. When you hear this music, you don’t think of some guys in a basement with a couple of crappy Radio Shack dynamic mics going into a consumer-grade stereo tape deck. What you hear is this: a young man with more talent than you can ever possibly imagine anyone on Earth having, absolutely driven (i mean truly, awesomely hell-bent for leather here) to make some damn incredible, original music, almost entirely by himself, a la early Todd Rundgren, or Stevie Wonder. And that frenetic energy is captured perfectly. No, the sound itself is actually pretty spectacular, especially considering that he did it all on his own in various apartments and spaces, without any sort of budget or outside producers.

If you don’t believe me, go and grab one of the mp3 versions he has up on his site for free. Right now, my personal favorite is a tossup between “The Overeducated Underclass” and “Cousin Ben.” As with almost all of his tunes, they are catchy; nearly overloaded with hooks that keep going for days (earworm alert!), featuring intimate-yet-intensely-fun lyrics straight out of real life and brimming with just the right kind and amount of crazy irony, laugh-out-loud stories, and all the joy, anger, and sadness to be found in the spectrum of the human condition, all performed with a passionate zeal and fluidly-jagged precision that will simply leave you reeling. Listen for some serious Frank Zappa chops in his playing, too. The guy can play circles around just about anyone, on virtually any instrument. (Prince who?) While you’re at it, grab some songs off his last record, since it’s out of print (for now), and a fantastic piece of work in its own right.

And yesterday, he started taking preorders, at a mere $12 a pop (that includes shipping anywhere in the U.S. – overseas orders are also available). Although he’s almost certainly sold enough already, the first 150 75 orders come with a special handmade “making of” zine which is sure to be a serious collector’s item when this guy hits the Big Leagues, which should happen at some point in the months following the aforementioned 27/07/10 official release date. (So get in on this one and hope for the best, because that one little limited-edition bonus is gonna be worth some serious cash on eBay someday, and you don’t wanna have to mope about how you had the chance to cash in on that but you didn’t take it.) Anyway, even if you aren’t one of the lucky 150 75, you’re gonna get some seriously amazing independent music out of the deal.

(And for what it’s worth, i hear his cookies are freaking crazy-making.)

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

Happy Deathday, Brother Theodore.

Brother Theodore was imprisoned by Nazis at Dachau. He played chess (a game he excelled at so profoundly that he once beat thirty fucking Stanford professors simultaneously – yes, read that again) with Albert Einstein, who helped him emigrate to the United States, where he would eventually become a cult hero with his uniquely surreal gallows humor and eccentric monologues, along with acting as Gollum in the classic Rankin/Bass animated feature The Hobbit, and in such movies as The Last Unicorn and the Tom Hanks vehicle The ‘Burbs. He was a staple of the late-night talk shows in the 1970s and 1980s. He died nine years ago today.

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Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. Please leave any comments there.

I was raised as an ordinary kid in a family that didn’t really attend church every single Sun-day but still did so frequently. My friend Mark Carper took me to an anti-rock & roll preacher sideshow at his church, the Colonial Baptist Church in the hills to the East of Nuke City. It was through that incalculably bizarre experience that i came to accept Christ the Redeemer into my heart, lungs, knees, ears, nose, and throat. I even destroyed some of my favorite LPs.

Later i became more moderate.

My grandparents (she a lapsed Catholic, i’m not too sure what he was before they became Methodists), right-thinking they were, didn’t have me baptized, reasoning that i’d do it myself if that’s what i truly wanted. So at the age of 14 i cleansed my spirit like good old St. John (but with just a dab of water, not a whole damn river).

But the whole time i was a devout Christian, i kept asking questions of our Sunday School teachers: Why are there so many religions? How do we know that Buddhism isn’t the one true religion? If killing is wrong, why does god kill so many people all the time when he gets in his moods? &c.

I’d also heard about how the Beatles found enlightenment in the East, and wondered how it could be that those four English chaps could make records so vastly incomparably better than our own Pat Boone, he of such good moral standing and strong Christian faith.

By and by, i grew up, started smoking cigarettes and screwing girls and reading books of dubious moral value. I got turned on to pot and LSD and started realizing that there is so very much more to the universe than this nice, tidy little story we’re all told in Sunday School. I realized that there are simply cultures that are incompatible with the overall Christian blueprint, much revised over the centuries as it had become. It seemed to me that Christianity obviously couldn’t be the One True Religion it heralded itself to be.

Then my uncle Stephen found himself dying from AIDS. Why should god be so incredibly crappy to us humans? After he died, my grandmother noticed that his name was no longer printed in the church directory under our family’s listing. She was understandably incensed, having taken that as an indirect denial of his continued presence as part of the hallowed twinkling in the Lord’s eyes. She pretty much lost her shit over that.

That was the final straw for me as well. I figured out real quick that Christianity, at least in its current incarnation, is about the most phony fucking gig in town.

I explored elsewhere: first Wicca, then paganism and other namby-pamby New Age spiritualities, then North American Indian shamanism, then Taoism, then Buddhism, then Hinduism, then various forms of the occult, then Qabala Judaism (not the Hollywood crap), then more occultism (including Satanism). When i finally found Eris and read the Principia Discordia (i am now a full-ass Pope*), and dove into the Church of the SubGenius (where i am a reverend), i realized what i should have known all along: all religions are full of crap. As far as i can tell, they all DO point to the same thing: lies and self-heresy. I took from all this only two things: the concept of WILL (Crowley) aka INTENT (Castaneda), and the simple damn idea that you should be nice to your fellow organisms, whoever they are, avoiding stupid, fruitless endeavors like hitting them over their heads with rocks (wherever possible).

Having had an interest in science from a young age, i always valued truth over fiction, lies, fabrications, or embellishments. I still see truth as an unalterable thing: all things being measurable, one must have mass and either be at rest or in motion. Relativity does not mean that these values are subjective. Killing another human being cannot possibly be “wrong” for one person, but “right” for another. It is either right or it is wrong. The fact that individual humans can measure the same thing and come up with wildly varying answers only points out the flaws in each of our lenses. There must be a correct solution which is not invalidated by any other.

Therefore, i reject god in all its forms, because it makes no sense in the context of the rest of nature which we have studied for the same number of millenia and have a pretty good grasp of in contrast.

*actually, my title is CounterPope

Comments are generally closed here due to the WordPress plugin that i use (ljxp), which, when connecting to LJ to update a post, basically deletes the entire post and recreates it as an entirely new post. I've known about this for a while, and i'm not real happy about it, but either the LJ API is not well understood over there, or it's not easy or possible to update a post without destroying it.

So if you've commented on anything i've crossposted here from my blog, and i've updated that post and lost your comment(s), sorry.

That is all.

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. Please leave any comments there.

Tonight, after i’d picked up Holly from her car pool in Bellbrook, we went to the Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant there on Wilmington Pike to grab a bite to eat.

Wow, was it icy out! Unfortunately, the worst ice we’d have to deal with was in their parking lot.

Have you ever seen one of those science videos explaining black holes, or gravity, by showing you a marble spinning around a drain? That’s exactly what it was like.

Their parking lot is so uneven. Iced over, it is absolute hell on earth. Naturally, there was not one speck of rock salt to be witnessed anywhere. Wet glass, indeed.

When we first pulled in, we started sliding immediately. We slid to a stop after a good 30 feet, narrowly missing other parked cars and the concrete-lined edge of the lot, which could have done a real number on my wheels and undercarriage. Mind you, i had been doing less than10mph!

Spinning my wheels was the only way to get any traction at all. But no sooner than i would start moving, but the car would start descending down the hill, sideways. We very scarcely managed to avoid hitting curbs and suchlike, but i don’t know how.

This lasted for around twenty minutes.

Did the manager come out to offer to help? Nope. Did i feel like risking life and limb to walk uphill in that unholy, slick, uphill mess of solid, wet ice to ask for help, or tell them off for not salting their Mt. Fuji-like parking lot? Well, yes, but i knew that i’d absolutely certainly slip and hit my head and kill myself at the exact moment the next motorist suffered a similar fate and ran over my still-warm corpse.

Helpfully, the drivethrough window offered employees a hilarious view, which they took in turns, laughing and pointing.

So if you ever see me at a Big Boy restaurant, especially a Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant, please shoot me in the face for it, because i declare unequivocally, right here, that my money will never again come into contact with their filthy, greasy (and very likely cockroach-infested) registers.

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

I put together this YouTube playlist of Carl Sagan’s “You Are Here”/”Pale Blue Dot” speech. I highly recommend checking it out.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

“Ann Druyan suggest an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”

- Carl Sagan