I think we need to clone Pink and hand her out to teenage girls about to make stupid decisions.

Yeah, she’d probably get them drunk a lot, but she seems like she’d make a pretty solid older sister otherwise.

“lozengeplay”

Now, I don’t smoke the weed anymore, but I’ll be damned if this thing wouldn’t make a FINE roach clip!

Surprisingly, only 2 people in the top 10 results for “ipod shuffle roach clip” on Google mention this. I’d think that people would be all the fuck over that shit.

Kids just aren’t resourceful these days.

Jim Dunlap, 1964-2007

I’ve been trying to think of what to say to sum up Jim Dunlap, what he meant to me, and what he meant to a very large group of people in my area for days. I think a lot of folks are going to have the same kind of trouble I’m having, because explaining Jim to people who haven’t had a long conversation or even a few of them is next to impossible. Jim lived a lot of lives within his one, all-too-short life, some of which I’ve really only heard him talk about and was never really a part of.

Among the lives of his that I was part of, I remember Jim first and foremost as being a guy who loved to laugh. He laughed like he didn’t care who was listening, almost to an Uncle Floyd Show cast member degree. He was very passionate about laughter. But then, he was about as passionate about all of his likes and dislikes as a guy could be, a straight shooter who’d get in trouble from time to time because he spoke his mind and stood his ground, though always in a thoughtful, educated way.

Thought and education are good things to mention here too, because Jim valued both quite a bit. He was constantly looking to educate himself further, learn more, and make sense of the world around him. Beyond the fact that he loved learning, it also seemed to come easy to him, because he had an absolutely razor sharp intellect. One of the things that I haven’t been able to stop thinking in the past few days is that his brilliant mind isn’t with us anymore. I’ll miss that mind as much as I’ll miss the laughter I mentioned earlier, and if I wasn’t already inspired by him to do so, the examples he set by being as passionate as he was about both are ones I think I and others would do well to follow.

As I think most of the people who talk about him in the days to come will tell you (most of us met him when he was our DJ at New Brunswick’s now-defunct Melody Bar), Jim quite obviously loved music, and he devoured every last bit of it that he could. He was always on the lookout for something good that he hadn’t heard, always did his homework on the music he loved (and in some cases, even the music he didn’t love), and he loved sharing music with people. In that respect, while I was never one of his students proper, I did get to know Jim as a teacher, and I can say with some confidence that the world lost a really good teacher on Friday.

Beyond all of what I’ve said (though what I’ve said barely scratches the surface, in my opinion) and perhaps most importantly, Jim was a loyal, supportive friend for the entire time I knew him, which was a decade or so, and I can only hope that I was the same for him.

Jim used to end his DJ sets at the Melody with these words each week: “Well, kids, that was fun.” It was fun, Jim. Thank you so much.

For those of you who didn’t know Jim, or knew him but never got to see these, his LiveJournal is here, and his MySpace page is here. Obviously, no substitute for the man himself, not by a long shot, but if you miss him, those are some places you can “visit” him, and if you never knew him, perhaps those will help you get to know him just a little bit.

From the Asbury Park Press, Jim’s obituary:

“James Michael Dunlap died Friday, March 9, at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick. He was 42.

James was born in New Brunswick, and lived in Milltown most of his life. He was working for Energy Photovohaics of Lawrenceville with solar energy. He also was a teacher of English at Trenton Charter School and in the Carteret and Keansburg school systems. He was a graduate of St. Joseph’s High School, Glassboro State University with a B.A. degree, and he received his master’s degree at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He was also a DJ and did a stand-up comedy routine.

He was predeceased by his father, James F. Dunlap, in 1979. James is survived by his mother, Donna E. Dunlap of Milltown; his wife, Mary Frances Dunlap of Howell; his son, Robert White of Howell, and his brothers, Thomas E. and his wife, Riaza Dunlap, of Milltown and Paul M. Dunlap of Milltown.

Funeral services will be held 10 a.m. Wednesday, March 14, at Boylan Funeral Home, 188 Easton Ave., New Brunswick, followed by a 10:30 a.m. Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes R.C. Church in Milltown. Cremation will be private. Family and friends may visit from 2 p.m.-4 p.m. and 7 p.m.-9 p.m. Tuesday at the funeral home. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to NJ Sharing Network (for Donor Families), 841 Mountain Ave., Springfield, NJ 07081, or to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tenn.”

(link for obituary here)

I’d like to take this opportunity to pour a 40 on the ground for my first-generation 512 MB iPod Shuffle. I replaced it yesterday with a blue 1 GB iPod Shuffle, one of the new models with the built-in clip, and I adore both the aesthetics and the increased capacity of the new model already (though it remains to be seen if it’ll be more or less roadworthy than the v1 Shuffle was), but at the same time, trading up is kind of like the end of a micro-era for me, and the original iPod shuffle definitely left an impact on my life that I’ll not soon forget.

It’s not that I was attached to the particular device I owned (it was actually my third iPod Shuffle; thankfully, Best Buy’s replacement plan worked wonders in this department, because v1 Shuffles were particularly susceptible to damage and wear), but there was and is a lifestyle that goes along with having one of the little buggers. Some of you might not actually put a lot of thought into what goes on your Shuffles, but for the rest of us (or at least me), owning a Shuffle was a never-ending, obsessive-compulsive battle to encapsulate the soundtrack of your entire life, up-to-the-minute, in the space of about 120 songs or less. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to mix tape or mix CD culture since the size of my music collection and the ready availability of most music made sharing tapes and CDs a somewhat obsolete exercise. I fully expect to catch hell for saying that about mixes, but honestly, if I can help it, I almost never make mix CDs for people anymore; why give someone 18 songs, no matter how thoughtful an exercise it may be, when for virtually the same price you can give someone a data DVD with 440 (completely legal, honestly purchased…yeah, that’s it!) songs on it?

With a 512 v1 Shuffle, if you had a significantly-sized music library, your mission, if you chose to accept it, was to assemble this tapestry of what your world sounded like: old favorites you never get tired of, recent tracks that’d just fallen into your lap, that new album you want to get familiar with, and of course, the oddball stuff like my sound file of Brad from “Bachelor Party” crying about how he killed a mule. This process sometimes would take hours (and even with the 1 GB model, I predict it still will at times), especially when you use the Shuffle-specific “reduce sound files to 128kb AAC” functionality to fit extra music on it, and it’s been a maddening process at times. It was a huge pain in the ass, but at those times when you really nail it, it’s awesome. You feel like the baddest motherfucker on Earth when you have this thing running for a few hours and nothing throws you off your game. It’s like being Superman, Jesus Christ and Hit…ok, not quite that good, but it’s good, and it made the Shuffle worth owning and worth suffering through equipment failures for. Hopefully, again, the new Shuffles aren’t as fragile as the v1s were, but I’ll still miss the tempramental little fucker that was the v1, because it was small and cool and enabled me to play bad songs by The Darkness at high volumes without having to carry very much with me for the first time in the history of portable devices. No tapes, no CDs, no big clunky piece of shit things. Just one little clunky piece of shit thing. God bless it. So long, fucker.