The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Good morning, Songfighters.

It's Tuesday and I have already been knee deep in writing today having written a song and a collaborative fiction piece. That's a good start for the day and I hope I can hold on to it.

QotD: Do you have any criminal skills?

What do I mean? Can you hotwire a car? Can you pick a lock? Can you pick a pocket? What kind of skills did you pick up during your misspent youth?

QotD: I can pick some simple tumble locks... I used to pick the locks of the arcade machines in my local bowling alley when I was 12 or so... I would be able to hit the "extra credit" button to play for free! Don't know why on earth I knew how to pick the locks tho at that age... I must have known some really shady people!

Roll Call: I practiced with (Who Are The) Brain Police last night. Here's a couple songs: Come Out And Play - I Come From The Water

QotD: As a kid I got really good at sneaking into the Plymouth Fair. The fairground is abandoned now, which I guess makes it a lot easier.

Even before computers made it much easier, I have always been good at forging documents. I made a parking pass when I was in college (for a friend), and fake passes to get into the Windows 95 launch (laminated, with gold embossing), see Jay Leno, and get the first release in a nice tote bag (for myself and a friend).

SPUD

I love that a Fed's asking this question.

Pleading the 5th, but off the record, many of David Niven's characters were role models for my misspent youth.

I have no criminal skills that I'm aware of. Guess I wouldn't make a good cop, either. I have three SF!er names written on a piece of paper who I'm guessing will 'fess up here. One already has, two to go.

QotD: Though I don't have any skills per-say that are handy, I've been told that I'm a fairly persuasive individual, and I might be able to talk individuals into doing illegal things, thereby making me a potential accompliase.

A friend of mine growing up had downloaded the "Anarchists' Cookbook" off of the internet once. I never read any of it, but he used to brag of all the different ways he could do things like you would expect to be in it.

EmbersOfAutumn wrote:per-say

You mean "per se".

No criminal skills, but I'm often tempted to "vandalize" menus and public signage with spelling and grammar corrections.

jimtyrrell wrote:Roll Call: I practiced with (Who Are The) Brain Police last night. Here's a couple songs: Come Out And Play - I Come From The Water

Sounds great Jim. Good sound for live. I've always liked The Toadies, nice job.

melvin wrote:

EmbersOfAutumn wrote:per-say

You mean "per se".

No criminal skills, but I'm often tempted to "vandalize" menus and public signage with spelling and grammar corrections.

... Grammatical errors are like the kryptonite to my Superman. I usually pride myself on it and am quite the stickler of it. I actually feel emasculated...

melvin wrote:I'm often tempted to "vandalize" menus and public signage with spelling and grammar corrections. .......

Melvin: .....now if you will excuse me ladies.....I'm off to cause trouble for the establishment.

Gawd, one of my big pet peeves is when my editor friends start editing shit when we're in a restaurant or something. Attention people in my general vicinity: it's okay to notice mistakes and not mention them. I will not be awarding any prizes.

QOTD: there has always been a secret agent inside of me yearning to come out.
All my jobs in my late teens where at night, so I would amuse myself by doing mischievous things late at night.

Like breaking into abandoned buildings, apartments, or construction areas.
Sneaking into the local municipal airport and checking out the planes.
Once I found the key code for the car gate in the airport, then we used my friends Camaro, and managed to get 98mph using the runway.
We went back a second time the following week, but when we turn up the high beans to survey the area inside the airport, we found 2 cop cars sitting quietly with their light off, right in front of us, we turned around and luckily they did not followed us.

I did stuff like this for years, and only got caught once by someone that knew me, then he left a sticky note stating “Andre was here at midnight”

Now a days I just get off by reading other peoples emails.

erik wrote:Gawd, one of my big pet peeves is when my editor friends start editing shit when we're in a restaurant or something.

Favorite menu mistake: Instead of prosciutto, prostitute.

DRC: I was a latchkey kid who often forgot his key so I learned how to pick and jimmy doors. I can do the credit card bit like in the movies . And I used to be fairly good at three card monte which almost always involved 4 cards.

(see RG, even the fed fessed up)

Dre wrote:I did stuff like this for years, and only got caught once by someone that knew me, then he left a sticky note stating “Andre was here at midnight”

Ha ha! That's excellent!

JIm T - The songs sound good and tight. Nice to hear less than typical cover songs as well.

The spelling business: I go nuts when I see a sign around here that says "Come try our chowda".

qotd: I don't know if I still have any of these skills. I haven't used them in quite a while.

1. I used to shop lift really well. Several bottles of Mad Dog were taken. I used to steal cartons of cigarettes and sold them later. (Back when there used to be walls of cartons accessible to the regular customer) I doubt that I have retained this skill but I did it so often back then that I still get the urge. For a few months I stole weeks worth of groceries at a time from the store I worked at. I would just bag it up and put it in a cart and everybody assumed I must have paid for them.

2. I used to move pot pretty well. I sold A LOT. I never got caught selling it although I did get busted with it ONCE. So I can still roll a mean joint and make a pipe just about out of anything. Toilet paper roll was my favorite, but apples and carrots were a close second.

NOW, I don't do any of this stuff anymore. I have completely changed.

However, a criminal skill that I now posses is this:

1. I download music illegally and I'm pretty fantastic at it.

qotd: Does climbing fences count as a criminal skill? I'm pretty good at that. I have also picked some locks in my time.

I would have to say that my only criminal skill that I know of is being able to acquire intellectual property that I am not entitled to, and I'm not even very good at it. Although back in high school and college I did enjoy various shenanigans with hacking into peoples' user accounts on university systems (not that it's particularly difficult or anything).

The only time I ever did any actual "evil" (rather than casual pranking), I had a roommate in college who was a complete asshole and one night I finally got sick of his shit and vandalized the copy of his resume that he kept on his website (I added a bunch of speling misteaks and grammatical problems and various jokey things that one should not put on a resume). It took him a month to notice it. He claimed that because of it he failed to get a job at some game company he had a huge boner for, not realizing that said game company had not been hiring for years (not to mention he had no real programming skills to speak of).

Prior to that, said roommate asked me for help with his computer graphics homework (he needed to write a triangle-filling routine) so I wrote it in the stupidest way I could think of which would still be technically correct and look credible, and he turned around and posted it on his website as "his" code as a tutorial for others (since he had this notion that he could convince the Internet he was some sort of genius and that would be the way to get a job).

As far as computer pranks go, I liked to write dumb little programs which would do things like make peoples' mouse cursors act weirdly (it would start out subtle and get more and more bizarre as time went on, like it would make the cursor act like it had inertia and gravity, or it'd make it move the cursor sideways for 30 seconds or whatever), and then I wrote this one program which would eject the computer's CD-ROM drive in various ways to confuse/annoy the person at the computer (for example, open the drive every 10 seconds for a while, then open then immediately close the drive for a little bit, then open it in such a way that the person couldn't even close the drive, and then as soon as the person got up to ask the lab assistant what was going on I'd make the drive close and then not do anything at all for a few minutes). I probably still have the source for those apps somewhere, although their utility would be limited.

There's a few other pranks I thought of doing but never got around to implementing... for example, the computer lab computers didn't have sound cards, but it was possible to control the "beep" in both duration and pitch and so I thought of making a special mp3 decoder which would send each frequency to a different computer with the idea that it'd sound like weird noise through most of the room but if you stood in one particular spot you'd hear a reasonable facsimile of the song. I never got around to implementing it though since it would have taken a lot of work for very little payoff.

Back when it was growing all around me, I had a pretty big thing for stealing fruit off of trees in yards.

I always take copious amounts of napkins and condiments from restaurants and convenience stores. I don't think there's anything illegal about that, but everyone always gives me hell for it.

Back in high school, I was pretty good at sneaking into the auditorium, so I wouldn't have to pay admission to events held in it.

I guess I seem to be fairly good at unintentionally making people want to give me drugs. I don't know what that's all about.

In my convenience store days, I would sell products to people that weren't supposed to be buying them if I knew them personally.

That's all I can think of. Blah.

Lord of Oats wrote:In my convenience store days, I would sell products to people that weren't supposed to be buying them if I knew them personally.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Could you provide an example?

DRC: Bought my first guitar today. Have no experience playing one. Or any instrument for that matter although I've gotten quite good at emulating them on the computer. Don't expect any guitar playing on SF from me for a couple/few months but hey who knows what the future holds?

QotD: Not really. I'm what's known as "Straight Edge". Or if you are making fun of me you might say I'm a "Good Two-Shoes". lol

fluffy wrote:

Lord of Oats wrote:In my convenience store days, I would sell products to people that weren't supposed to be buying them if I knew them personally.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Could you provide an example?

he sold cigarettes and beer to minors. and didn't clearly express his thought. that's what my money's on.