Corrections for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, February 2006
1. The recorded message for the Department of Corrections inmate locator hotline says, "Thank you for calling the ID/Warrants unit. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line." It then repeats for 15-30 minutes*, until an operator picks up. The message should say, "Fuck you for calling the ID/Warrants unit. Your call is not important to us. You might as well hang up now."
2. Though the facility opened nearly eight months ago, the CDC's website does not yet acknowledge the existence of Kern Valley State Prison, in Delano, California. Though it holds approximately 5,000 inmates, the Department of Corrections makes little to no effort to make its mailing address readily available. I personally found it on the eight page of Google results, in a .pdf file containg job listings.
This makes it quite difficult for family members or attorneys to simply correspond by mail with prisoners unlucky enough to end up at KVSP. It is especially confusing because there is another prison in Delano with a similar name - North Kern State Prison. In case you were wondering, the two prisons will not forward misdirected mail to each other. They just return the correspondence to sender with a sticker that says, "Inmate not found", which is something that I have also seen prisons do when the inmate inmate in question was deceased.
The CDC's site should be corrected to list Kern Valley State Prison and its address (provided here as a public service):
Kern Valley State Prison
3000 West Cecil Ave.
Delano, CA 93215
*Not an exaggeration
About six months ago I was reading this article about the new North Kern Valley prison and the totaly lie it's turned out to be to the community. Wanting to know what they were talking about I had looked up a google map of the two prisons since prisons always look neat an futuristic from space. Here's the two prisons which don't forward mail to each other, just so you can appreciate the physical distance in play. Delano, CA.
If you'd like to see other California State prisons and appreciate how our state government does everything possible to hide the fact that they do this to people by putting them in the middle of nowhere, check out these :
Avenal State Prison
Calipatria State Prison
Centinela State Prison
High Desert State Prison
Anyhow you get the idea. Also check out the photos of the wardens.
According to Gene's handy map and Google's driving directions, the two Kern Valley prisons are 1 mile and 44 feet apart. Couldn't they get an inmate to tunnel between them with the mail?
The warden from Central California Women's Facility was apparently out sick on picture day. Fucking CA penal system--egregrious prisoner isolation AND no yearbook make-ups.
Good to know the ladies have broken through the glass ceiling, though.
Wow, it's been a year since I bugged you last. Hah. It's because you were the A$$ Merchant guy and I had found some tracks of yours in my old Mp3 archive CDs. Anyways, yeah, you may remember this thread with a comment from me.
http://zembla.cementhorizon.com/archives/003585.html
I'm always vastly off topic, mentioning this or that about your old band. Heh. I think I found you through boredom and a creative google.com search. Yeah, then I performed the same search almost a year later. Mystical. The point of all of this was..
..do you have the whole CD still? Heh..my AIM and Yahoo are both still AkunenBlack
Hey, Mike. Actually, for A$$ Merchandise you´d have to talk to the guy who writes the Avenue Canyons blog. I´m pretty sure Sean had nothing to do with it, unless there was some under-the-table deal I don´t know about. I´ll write Jacob to make sure he looks at this comment string. If he doesn´t get back to you, he´s mean.
I've sent you request on to one of the band members.
it's like hive mind.
I tried Googling "ass merchants" (since it won't take "a$$" as a search term) and discovered that a) there are a lot of results which have nothing to do with the A$$ Merchants, b) somehow you can get from a$$ merchants to zoo porn within 4 pages of results, and c) the first result that looks like it could be relevant (but ultimately isn't) is a Flickr image posted by a Boback who I presume is the same Boback with whom Sean is acquainted. That's the only way I can figure that this guy got to Sean. On the same page of Google results is one that is in fact relevant, from Avenue Canyons, so I can only assume that the reason that this guy keeps writing to Sean instead of Jacob is that he doesn't like Jacob. Ironic, really, since he likes the A$$ Merchants so much.
On the Behind the Music special years from now, Doug, Brian, and Anderson will all say that Jacob was the heart and soul of the band but the fans never really understood him.
i think the soul of the band was really the purloined teletubbie voice boxes. no offense to jacob. mostly i think this because of how we cackled maniacally "steal their souls!" as we ripped the plastic boxes from their zippered pouches and threw the teletubbies around once they no longer had the ability to proclaim, "la-la!", "oopsie!" or "again, again!" the last always being my favorite after a rousing game of throw-the-green-one-down-the-staircase.
From Jacob's description of the A$$ Merchants' live performance, it sounds like the soul of the band was five simultaneously running WinAmps (or whatever it would have been at the time). I don't know, though, since I've been told that video footage of that performance exists, and that Michele did an amazing job of capturing the "experience," but I've sure never seen it.
i've never seen the video footage either. i mean, i saw it while i was taping it, but then i don't know what happened to it. i think doug has it.