Looking for input on a jQuery textscrolling problem, code inside.

The main page is, http://sorgalla.com/projects/jcarousel/ and what I'm trying to do is the text scrolling box
http://sorgalla.com/projects/jcarousel/examples/special_textscroller.html

I can set it up fine, it's just the example/codes given are for setting up the input to come from an RSS feed, and I just want to use it to scroll/display a description in some of my nodes since some are excessively long. So I'm having trouble converting the functions to just display my static text. Here's the original code.

function mycarousel_initCallback(carousel, state)
{
    // Lock until all items are loaded. That prevents jCarousel from
    // setup correctly and we have to do that in the ajax callback
    // function with carousel.setup().
    // We're doing that because we don't know the exact height of each
    // items until they are added to the list.
    carousel.lock();

    jQuery.get(
        'special_textscroller.php',
        {
            'feed': 'http://jquery.com/blog/feed/atom/'
        },
        function(xml) {
            mycarousel_itemAddCallback(carousel, xml);
        },
        'xml'
    );
};

function mycarousel_itemAddCallback(carousel, xml)
{
    var $items = jQuery('item', xml);

    $items.each(function(i) {
        carousel.add(i + 1, mycarousel_getItemHTML(this));
    });

    carousel.size($items.size());

    // Unlock and setup.
    carousel.unlock();
    carousel.setup();
};

/**
 * Item html creation helper.
 */
function mycarousel_getItemHTML(item)
{
    return '<h3><a href="'+$('link', item).text()+'">'+$('title', item).text()+'</a></h3><p>'+mycarousel_truncate($('description', item).text(), 90)+'</p>';
};

/**
 * Utility function for truncating a string without breaking words.
 */
function mycarousel_truncate(str, length, suffix) {
    if (str.length <= length) {
        return str;
    }

    if (suffix == undefined) {
        suffix = '...';
    }

    return str.substr(0, length).replace(/\s+?(\S+)?$/g, '') + suffix;
};

jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    /**
     * We show a simple loading indicator
     * using the jQuery ajax events
     */
    jQuery().ajaxStart(function() {
        jQuery(".jcarousel-clip-vertical").addClass('loading');
    });

    jQuery().ajaxStop(function() {
        jQuery(".jcarousel-clip-vertical").removeClass('loading');
    });

    jQuery('#mycarousel').jcarousel({
        vertical: true,
        size: 0,
        initCallback: mycarousel_initCallback
    });
});