The Daily Haggis: The Early Days

This whole blogging thing began for me back in early 2002. I was spending a lot of time reading news about films and television shows on websites like Ain’t It Cool News and Dark Horizons.

Inspired by a few early blogging pioneers and my own love of sharing useless entertainment news and rumors, I decided to create a weekly newsletter that I would send to my friends. After a month or two, the mailing list had grown by a couple hundred members (thanks to a few friends and their donated address books) and I was getting hooked on the idea of developing the newsletter into a website.

Almost like clockwork, I received a warning from both Yahoo! Groups (who hosted the mailing list) and my ISP stating I was “spamming” so I decided to shut it down and move it all online. Luckily I had already made the transition and was ready to phase out the newsletter permanently .

The first version of The Daily Haggis (pictured above, sans a few pictures) used Moveable Type and very rudimentary HTML. Since the Content Management System (CMS) of MT allowed me to post several times a day without having to manually generate all my HTML pages (geek mode off), I decided that it would become “The Daily Haggis.”

This version was originally located as a sub-website of (the original) onefryshort.com. I didn’t purchase the domain name until the next April, where the second version of The Daily Haggis debuted.

Check back over the next few weeks as I continue down memory lane to the official blogiversary!

Link: The Daily Haggis: The Early Days

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Posted by Haggis on November 28th, 2006 @ 8:50 pm.

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Four Years of the Haggis

Another Useless Corner Of The Web

The Daily Haggis is MOVING!

Four Years of the Haggis

Welcome everyone to the brand new redesign of The Daily Haggis.

Why another redesign? For the Fourth anniversary of this little weblog, of course!

The change is to reflect the retooling of the content and topic of the website itself. The site is now much quicker loading, uses entirely CSS website design, and utilizes a number of new tools to add more maneuverability between current and past articles.

Here’s a few of the changes:

• Old Skool Meets New - The new design is built around the past incarnations of the website, going all the way back to the beginning. The new logo and graphics represent this. The new template is also Web 2.0 based, which means clean look and interactivity.

• Category Icons - Hurray! For those loyal readers that have been lurking since the early days, you will notice the re-appearance of the category icons, much like the original version of The Daily Haggis used. Click on any of the icons at the bottom of the articles to see more.

• del.icio.us bookmarks - For use with the popular social bookmarking site, use this to add specific articles to your del.icio.us bookmark collection!

• Subscribe to comments - This is one of my favorite new features. For those of you that like to keep up with the discussion after you have left a comment on an article, you can now have the site email you whenever a response has been posted. Includes a built-in content management panel for quick subscribing and unsubscribing of past topics.

• Subscribe via Email - You can now get updates to the site via email, via the Feedburner service. It will email you a digest of the entries on a daily or weekly basis, with many options.

Plus several other under-the-hood updates and tweaks, and more coming over the next few weeks. Stay tuned over the next few days for a little journey back in time with The Daily Haggis in pictures, as well as some special features I have planned.

Link: Four Years of the Haggis

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Posted by Haggis on November 26th, 2006 @ 6:52 pm.

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Third Decade

Marvel’s Civil War & The New Face of Comic Books

I’m a big fan of comics, almost to a fan-boy state of mind. I’ve followed Marvel and DC Comics since the early 90’s, although I tend to lean more to the Marvel set of characters since the names and backgrounds aren’t nearly as hokey as DC’s second tier of heroes tend to get. I’m not talking about Superman or Batman, but people like “Elongated Man” or “Captain Atom.” Never heard of em? Me neither, at least until Paul Dini’s Justice League Unlimited cartoon. I’m more of a Spider-Man and X-Men fan.

Anyway, I take a break every few years due to terrible story lines or poor artwork. This happened big time in the late 90’s, when all of Marvel and DC’s good artists and writers jumped ship and started their own comics company (Image Comics). The stories and artwork dipped horribly, and I lost interest.

Jump forward to around 2001, and suddenly the face of Marvel Comics was changing. The good artists all returned for freelance projects, they hired even better artists, and commissioned Hollywood writers such as Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer), J. Michael Strazenzski (Babylon 5), and Damon Lindloff (Lost) to work on projects. The biggest change? They dropped a severely archaic and ridiculous rating system established in the 1950’s (and only slightly updated since) called the Comics Code Authority.

Comics came under heavy fire in the early 1950s, thanks to a public’s rising fear of juvenile delinquency and one prominent psychiatrist’s willingness to pin the blame on the vastly popular comic books of the era. Under intense public pressure, the comics industry agreed to adopt a code of ethics and to establish a “voluntary” authority that would approve every book prior to its distribution. In truth, there was nothing voluntary about it; in the days before independent comic shops — when most comics were sold in supermarkets, department stores, and mom-and-pop corner stores — comic publishers had no choice but to comply with the CCA if they wanted to survive.*

Almost every comic from the 1950’s to 2001 had the CCA stamp on it’s cover except for a few key issues in the past, such as Amazing Spider-Man #96 which featured a story about Harry Osborn turning to drug use to deal with his problems, or D.C. Comics’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 that featured Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy on the cover as a prominent drug user–complete with paraphernalia and all. DC & Marvel pushed the envelope at the time when they released these comics. The CCA threatened to block distribution on these issues, however when they released each of the titles made history making sales.

Today’s comics are not what they were in the 1960’s, 1980’s, or even the 1990’s. Because of switching to a more ratings-type system like movies and television have, they are free to publish all sorts of stories from tame children-safe comics, to much more mature (read: violence and profanity) titles like The Punisher.

A good example of the huge and entirely impressive change in storylines can be seen in the recent multi-title crossover event in Marvel Comics’ Civil War series which pits hero-vs-hero and will change the face of the Marvel Universe forever.

Ground Zero - Stamford, CT

More after the jump…

Link: Marvel’s Civil War & The New Face of Comic Books

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Posted by Haggis on July 6th, 2006 @ 3:09 pm.

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The 3D Chalk Art of Julian Beever

I see a lot of really silly and ridiculous stuff on MySpace bulletins, but I’d have to say that this is by far the absolutely coolest chain letter i’ve received so far.

The picture above and below are examples of 3D Chalk Art (called “anamorphism”) done by British artist Julian Beever. He travels the world leaving his mind-blowing perspective art on sidewalks everywhere.

Here’s the blurb about him on his Wikipedia page:

Julian Beever is a British chalk artist who creates 3D chalk drawings on pavement using a projection called anamorphism that creates the illusion, or Trompe-l’oeil. His street paintings appear to defy the laws of perspective.

Besides the 3D art, Beever paints murals and replicas of the works of masters. He is often hired as a performance artist and to create murals for companies. Beever is interested in advertising and marketing, as well. He has worked in the U.K., Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Australia.

There are several more available on his official website (currently down), and even more if just Google search his name. Here’s a few of my favorites:

Lady in a swimming pool (seen at correct angle)

Lady in a swimming pool (seen from wrong angle, to give you an idea of how it’s done)

People are actually walking around the “hole”

It’s a schooner!

And my all time favorite:

Du-na-na-na-na-na-na-nana Batman!

Link: The 3D Chalk Art of Julian Beever

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Posted by Haggis on March 31st, 2006 @ 1:39 pm.

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True California Tales

The following account is absolutely true. Names of the individuals have been removed to protect their identities.

A crew of five weary tour members were driving through California late one night and had decided to pull over at a beach in Orange County to see the ocean and get a little sleep before continuing on the long journey ahead.

After a brief walk to sight-see the area, the group put Napolean Dynamite on the mini DVD Player and settled in for the next few hours of sleep. Everyone’s minds drew from Tina the Llama and Pedro to a sound sleep within half a hour.

Approximately an hour later a loud rap on the drivers window awakens everyone to see two flashlights illuminating the vehicle and its sleepy passengers.

“Roll down the window,” states Officer #1.

More after the jump…

Link: True California Tales

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Posted by Haggis on January 18th, 2006 @ 11:59 am.

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From The World of Random Questions..

Albums You’ll Never Want To Hear

I discovered this thread through Fark.com’s link to UK’s The Sun website. Usually the purveyor of quality british porn and tabloid celebrity stories, they have simply outdone theirself on this one. I proudly present:

ALBUMS YOU’LL NEVER WANT TO HEAR:
But will probably find in the bargain bin at Half Price Books

I can’t tell what type of music this is, but just by the looks of the cross-eyed doofus on the cover, I can already tell that it’s horrible, whatever it is. Can you borrow a feeling, Cody? No, but you can borrow $5 for a haircut. We can work on the corrective vision later.

Now, I really don’t understand the concept for this cover. Is this his underage lover and he’s trying to break it off with her before his wife finds out? What exactly is going on in this photo? I’m not sure, but for some reason it makes me really uncomfortable.

Holy christ, this is the most horrendous thing i’ve ever seen on an album. Not only does the freakin dummy give me the heebie-geebies, but the whole concept for an album with a singing DUMMY makes me want to stop writing this article and hide under my desk in the fetal position. Trees can’t talk. That’s just silly.

And last, and certainly least, I bring you the artist (and I use that term loosely) known only as the ubiquitous “Joyce”. I imagine that the content of the album is nothing but her spouting off 12 tracks of hardcore gansta rap. Strange though.. I never knew that Tootsie made an album.

These were only four of the twelve that were posted on the site in one of the most hilarious slide shows i’ve seen. If you want to check out the rest of the gallery of malcontents, click here to read the whole article.

Link: Albums You’ll Never Want To Hear

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Posted by Haggis on August 25th, 2005 @ 8:16 am.

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Something Fishy

My friends have way too much free time on their hands.

A couple of them have gotten together and decided to prank me, or at least try to(okay, ya got me). I started receiving random pictures of fish this morning from people I know with no subject on the email. At first (being an IT guy) I thought it was some random virus, but then when I realized I was the only person getting these “fishy” emails, it started to click. And yes, I had long figured it out when I got the email from “The Sisters.” Good one.

What’s the connection between the fish and April Fools? In France the schoolchildren have a custom on April Fools day to put pictures of fish on other kids backs, and when it’s discovered they yell out “April Fish!” (in French, of course.) French people are weird, but I think my friends are even stranger.

Here’s the pictures: (updated as I receive them)

I just got two more fish:

Okay Beatrix and Tulinda, I get it now. Very funny.

… And another. I think i’ll have seafood tonight.

I like this one:

The weirdest ones yet:

Last two, I promise.

Link: Something Fishy

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Posted by Haggis on April 1st, 2005 @ 2:44 pm.

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