Musings and rants about politics and geekery with a distinct Chicago flavor.
You ever belatedly realize you know someone on television?
On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Anya’s “best friend” Halfrek was played by an actress named Kali Rocha.
She was an actress in two of the four productions at McCarter Theater the year I was a marketing intern there, and we talked several times. She performed roles in “The Royal Family” and “The Mai.” Very talented and very sweet.
I had seen her on television in the role and thought she looked very familiar, but didn’t place her until very recently.
Very tired. But think I’ve found the “magic bullet” for making my computer setup more comfortable. I bought the iCurve for my computer … it basically brings the laptop up to eye level, and lets you plug in a full-sized keyboard and mouse (the link is to a hi-res pic, in case you want to see what the setup pretty much looks like) … judging from about a day and a half so far, it definitely feels like it’s much easier on my posture, and I can type much longer, so far.
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*snicker*
Interesting article on how we could practically reduce spam.
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This is a test. Why? This story. (Okay, after reading the article, it should work anyway. But interesting for any LiveJournal reader or author.)
God knows I haven’t agreed with much my government’s been doing lately, but this is pretty cool … if not a bit ironic, given Ashcroft’s recent anti-pornography war.
An interesting article on the time-travelling spammer.
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Shut up!
The Department of Justice’s rah-rah-sis-boom-bah-gooooo-PATRIOT! website.
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I have a cousin in the Army — God knows why they want him over there, but he’s there. Looking at his weather forecast, suddenly the heat wave in Chicago doesn’t look that bad.
I never listened to Henry Rollins before. This routine has sold me. I laughed my ass off HARD. If you have never checked out one of my links, CHECK THIS ONE OUT. (However, not for the faint of heart.)
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
“[Jennifer Garner] has agreed to appear in a recruitment video that the CIA plans to produce and screen for prospective applicants at job fairs and college campuses, said Chase Brandon, the CIA’s liaison with the film industry.”
*sigh*
Washington Post: “The main eyebrow-raiser is the posting on the official White House Web site of speeches by Bush and Vice President Cheney at fundraisers for their reelection campaign. The government Web site, www.whitehouse.gov, displays, for example, Bush’s speech to a Bush-Cheney luncheon last week in Oregon, in which Bush pronounced the event ‘a record fundraiser,’ and the previous week’s fundraiser in California, in which he said, ‘We’re laying the foundation for next year’s campaign.’
“Foul, judges Larry Noble, the executive director of the watchdog group Center for Responsive Politics. ‘It’s inappropriate. It’s a government Web site. It’s the use of government property for political work, which is illegal. They have to be careful.’
“The Democrats’ all-purpose gumshoe, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee, protested that ‘a government Web site paid for by taxpayer funds is being used to disseminate partisan, political information.’ Particularly irksome to Waxman was a Cheney speech on the White House site joking that those present ‘probably paid a little more to get in than I did,’ and noting that ‘every dollar we raised was important.’
“An analysis by Waxman’s lawyers argued that Bush and Cheney, when they appear at fundraisers, are giving ‘not official speeches, bur rather political speeches.’ According to the U.S. Code (31 U.S.C 1301(a)), ‘appropriations shall be applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made,’ which means only for official — not political — purposes. By posting campaign speeches on the Web site, White House staffers could be violating the Hatch Act, which restricts political actions by government employees. If the White House considers the fundraising speeches ‘official,’ the lawyers argue, they could be violating anti-bribery statutes.
“White House spokeswoman Ashley Snee said the administration believes no laws have been violated.”
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Pull my finger!
This is extremely disgusting. One of the seven deadly sins in all its photographic glory. Yeesh.
Attempted assassin of presidents John Hinckley due to be released …
Where’s my CD refund check!?
Boy, do I feel old after reading this.
And now, because of course there’s nothing more important in the world to worry about nowadays, the Justice Department begins a war against pornography. Thank you, Mr. Ashcroft, because of course the entire population of America believes in the same extremely fundamentalist version of the Christian faith as you do, you stupid f—k. Here’s a Salon article that’s really rather good and draws some comparisons with the prosecutions of Lenny Bruce.
Canada sez: NO SMILING ON YOUR PASSPORTS!
This is kinda cool … relics from the past of Apple.
Oh, biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig surprise. We couldn’t have Windows emulation running faster than on any actual Windows machine, could we … *sigh*
Do you remember hearing about Timothy Bottoms as George Bush in the Bush parody ‘That’s My Bush‘? Well, now he’s playing the President in a serious drama, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis. Creepy. I’m glad I don’t have cable.
Taco Bell: “Who Says You Can’t Buy Votes?”
Very, very interesting analysis of the media’s stilted and even somewhat hostile reaction to Howard Dean.
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Let me summarize this St. Petersburg Times article for you: Lieberman pissed off a lot of the Democratic Party and is very confident that being completely in the middle and quite boring will get him the election. Okaaaaaaay then, Joe.
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John Gruber: “Imagine if the plumbing in corporate America worked with the same degree of reliability as their computer infrastructure. This would mean that individual sinks, urinals, and toilets would go out of order on a regular basis. Water from drinking fountains would turn brown, but, hey that’s just how it is. Every few weeks, teenage pranksters from Hong Kong would overflow every toilet in the building, knocking them out of commission.
“In response to these problems, large companies would have large in-house plumbing staffs, led by a CPO (chief plumbing officer) reporting directly to the CEO. New restroom equipment would be chosen by the same plumbing staff that is employed for maintenance, thus providing a nearly irresistible disincentive to choose reliable low-maintenance equipment from other vendors.
“In fact, all of the plumbing comes from a single company based in the state of Washington. This company’s plumbing equipment is engineered such that it is extremely difficult to see how it actually works. The corporate plumbers are often equipped with certifications from this manufacturer, but they (the plumbers) in fact understand very little about how toilets and sinks truly work.”
Some roadside billboards you just really want to see. My favorites had to be the Cryogenic Sperm Bank, “Survivor,” and Gap ones. 
A man bought a BlackBerry on eBay for about $15. When he put a battery in it, he got access to a huge amount of proprietary information from the original owner’s employer … which just happened to be Morgan Stanley. Whoops!
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On the morning of Saturday, August 30, 2003, I will be making arrangements to shut down this journal permanently. Thus, if you want to save anything from this journal, please plan to do it before that time.
I am doing this because this journal, aside from its brief stint as a link blog, was originally designed to be a place for me to express my deeper feelings to the world. I did so as a sort of self-therapy, as a way of working things out for myself and expressing emotions that, for one reason or another, I couldn’t do as myself.
This particular method doesn’t work for me anymore, for two specific reasons. First, I am now actually seeing a therapist, and that process has been more adequately fulfilling the need for working things out. Second, I no longer really find myself with the energy to come home and type out an entry several pages long. When I do want to speak for several paragraphs about what I’m doing with my life, that usually takes place within the context of e-mail messages to friends.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, really, due to the fact that this journal was hardly ever being updated anymore.
It’s been a pleasure. Take care.
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Newsweek reports that 49% of Americans don’t want to see Bush in office again, while 44% do. It’s a nice statistic. I hope it’s true; polls are way too often skewed …
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Looks like the first season of “The West Wing” will be available in the US on DVD November 18 (for $60, eek).
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An interesting article about how airlines could bring their technology into the 21st century … if they had the money. Which they don’t.
Al Franken: “In addition to thanking my own lawyers, I’d like to thank Fox’s lawyers for filing one of the stupidest briefs I’ve ever seen in my life.” Al really needs his own website.
Hey, let’s have a 9-year-old ask a question of Donald Rumsfeld that one of our administration’s speechwriters wrote for her!
CNN: “The Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog says White House officials pressured the agency to prematurely assure the public that the air was safe to breathe a week after the World Trade Center collapse.”
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My old elementary school had one of these. And my Dad brought one of these home to be our first computer. But scroll down to the plastic beige one that cost under $100. Hmm … evidently our beige plastic TI99/4a was so cheap that it was the cause of the death of TI’s computer line. How odd.
And here’s one on the very first portable Macintosh. It’s Maggie’s ancestor …
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I had a whole bunch of links I was going to post which I lost. However, one of them was that a judge threw out the suit against Al Franken. Yay!
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has evidently criticized the United States for not providing more protection to the UN mission in Baghdad … despite reports that the mission had refused more protection … saying ”they should not have been allowed to turn it down.”
This is a pretty cool webpage about a very lifelike mechanical swan.
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He’s making a list,
He’s checking it twice,
gonna find out who’s naughty or nice:
John Ashcroft is coming to town!
(It’s a reference to Ashcroft’s national tour in support of the PATRIOT Act.)
Also, a Palestinian peer-to-peer company basically says they’ve declared war against the MPAA and RIAA. Read their press release; it’s really quite fun. Sort of an adult version of “nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah, nyah, you can’t get me!”.
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We’re Enron. We want to pay our creditors about 18 cents on the dollar what we owe them, but damn it, if you owe us money, you better pay every penny or we’ll haul your ass into court! (Yes, we can still pay our lawyers.)
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Ticketmaster guarantees spam; you don’t have a choice.
Scientology has evidently managed to suspend the right to parody, thanks to Pinellas County Judge Robert E. Beach. His order has been in effect since April 2002.
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Downright disturbing yet amusing.
Henry Raddick’s reviews.
Google Calculator + Douglas Adams = funny people at Google.
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More gems from the Sun-Times‘ Zay L. Smith:
News Item: Colorado passes law that requires teachers and students to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school.
Good. It is about time we started requiring Americans to celebrate their freedom.
(U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock has issued a preliminary injunction against the law, saying, “You can’t compel a citizen of the United States to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.”)
When he reported about the Bush action figure, he added, “And, kids, don’t worry. If the action figure goes AWOL, you can send a G.I. Joe after it.”
“Classical art might warp our children’s minds.”
Skippy the Goth Kangaroo.
Looks like the entire huge Blackout of 2003 was caused by a power plant that was 45 miles away from where my father grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio.
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Jason Kottke cites how ‘selling out‘ has become a bit of a dated concept, and cites indie artists defending themselves. However, what else can we call it when Devo willingly performs their song “Whip It” as a Swiffer jingle? (”Whip it good” is now going to become “Swiffer’s good.”)
Paul Krugman of the New York Times comments on how penny-pinching and privitization in the U.S. military is putting soldiers at risk.
Robert Cringely: “I think Macs threaten the livelihood of IT staffs. If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren’t you putting your job in danger?”
John Wehr took 50 photographs as he walked through New York City during the blackout. They are very interesting.
Jon Stewart does his unique brand of reporting about Fox News’ lawsuit against Al Franken for using the term “fair and balanced.” As Stewart says, if anyone knows about how to ‘blur and tarnish’ the term “fair and balanced,” it’s Fox News.
I finally found a link to the complaint Fox News signed, by the way. Here it is. You should read it; it’s hilarious.
“Defendants’ intent in using ["Fair and Balanced"] … is clear — they seek to … confuse the public as to the origin of the book, and, accordingly, boost sales of the Book.”
“Moreover, since Franken’s reputation as a political commentator is not of the same caliber as the stellar reputations of FNC’s on-air talent … ”
“‘Lateline’ was cancelled after only 19 episodes.”
And paragraph 77 is … well, Jesus, just read it:
“Franken has recently been described as a ‘C-level political commentator’ who is ‘increasingly funny.’ Franken has physically accosted Fox News personalities in the past, and was reported to have appeared either intoxicated or deranged as he flew into a rage near a table of Fox News personalities at a press correspondents’ dinner in April 2003. Franken is neither a journalist nor a television news personality. He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight. Franken is commonly perceived as having to trade off of the name recognition of others in order to make money. One commentator has referred to Franken as a ‘parasite’ for attempting to trade off of Fox News’ brand and O’Reilly’s fame in the Preliminary Cover of his Book.”
All of this to defend their use of the phrase “fair and balanced” … irony is truly not dead!
Evidently Jonathan Abrams, creator of Friendster, is a bit of a dick.
Speaking of Friendster … through this entry for Friendster, I found the Devil’s Dictionary 2.0. Very cool site.
Nick Gales, on minke whale flatulence: “We got away from the bow of the ship very quickly … it does stink.” I imagine … that’s one big mammal, so that’s one big mammal gastrointestinal tract, I’m sure.
“Hi! I’m Troy McClure. You may have seen me in such films as … ”
Mindfuck of the day: Scientific American: “Related results suggest that our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimensions, might instead be ‘written’ on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram. Our everyday perceptions of the world as three-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of two alternative ways of viewing reality.”
Cory Doctorow on all this suing-your-customers insanity:
Visa and its ilk will fall back on the traditional cop-out of the boardroom: “We have a duty to our shareholders to do everything in our power to protect our assets.” If that were the whole story, the CEO and the board would be irrelevant to the running of the company: it could just send out nasty legal letters to its customers, cavity-search them on the way out of the store, and make every customer sign a legal waiver before consenting to sell him its tchotchkes. The purpose of the senior management is to intelligently trade risks off against one another, not to blindly seek a nonsensical 100 percent surety at any price.
The Victorian Sex Cry Generator.
Courtney Love, oddly enough, is evidently Marlon Brando’s granddaughter.
Nader evidently took a pie in the face. Good.
NBC (southern CA): The airing of “Total Recall” [edit: ha ha ha] or another Schwarzenegger film, or a repeat of a “Diff’rent Strokes” episode with Gary Coleman on broadcast television in California would trigger the Federal Communications Commission’s equal time provision, allowing other candidates to demand the same amount of time.
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It’s eerily catchy.
This baby has two heads. Poor little girl.
Announcing the arrival of a beautiful new baby boy at St. Francis Health Center … Urhines Kendall Icy Eight Special K.
Homina. Long way since “Full House.”
An archive of different international accents … it’s actually pretty interesting.
Newest (and very cool) Google feature: Google Calculator.
Okay, I have a bit of a shock for you:
[pictures of Louanne from "King of the Hill" and Jasmine from "Clueless"]
All the same person.
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The flu sucks.
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London topped 100 degrees for the first time in its recorded history.
New York Times: “Judges frequently depart downward at the urging of the government, to reward defendants who cooperate with prosecutors. But the administration and its allies in Congress have made no secret of their unhappiness with judges who impose more lenient sentences than guidelines call for. [...] Mr. Ashcroft’s latest initiative raises these pressures to a new level. Under the new policy, federal prosecutors will be required in many cases to report when a judge departs downward from the sentence recommended by the federal guidelines.”
Wil Wheaton finds his e-mail is getting blocked as spam. He is, as you might imagine, quite overjoyed at this fact.
The author of Freenet, an Irish immigrant, has decided to return to his home country. Here is his statement of this on Slashdot. I find the replies to be highly representative of the “my country, right or wrong” brand of patriotic stupidity.
He is evidently not alone. Someone in their reply cited a CNN article about how very many people have decided to emigrate to Canada.
Interesting Slashdot story about new computer virii that download child pornography to your computer, and someone who nearly got jailed as a result. Once again, another reason I’m glad that so few virii exist for the Mac OS X system.
Part 3.5 of Patrick Farley’s amazing The Spiders is now online …
Did you know that the lead singer for Iron Maiden is also an Astraeus Airlines pilot? He logged 600-700 hours of flight last year.
Avenue Q. I only wish this was showing in Chicago, too. I was laughing my ass off. If you’re in New York, go see this show!
I received The Animatrix as a birthday gift and highly recommend it …
This is a “movie sequence showing the orbit and disruption of a dwarf satellite in a dark matter halo over [a span of] 5 billion years.” Rather cool … a little freaky, if you wonder what happens to any of the inhabitants on those little pixels.
Oh. Of course! The best way to rescue any sort of technology that would otherwise be totally reviled by the public — such as tiny little trackable bugs attached to every single thing you buy — is to claim that their presence there is now needed to combat terrorism. Oh, for Pete’s sake.
ABCNews.Com: “The 4th Infantry Division said it had launched a new mission, Operation Ivy Lightning, to hunt Saddam loyalists it believed had fled to isolated villages east of Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit to escape repeated U.S. raids.”
Hmmm …
Operation
Ivy
Lightening, huh?
And … Fox News Channel has sued liberal humorist Al Franken and the Penguin Group to stop them from using the phrase “fair and balanced” in the title of his upcoming book.
This is a pretty trippy Shockwave follow-the-cursor thing.
A blogger decides to chart his own personal experiment about whether penis enlargement pills work.
Oh, my God … living proof that the beauty magazines would have women strive for really just doesn’t exist. Here and here.
The advertising artwork of Dr. Seuss.
One of those giant Pocket PC display ads … amusingly enough, with the big Error Screen of Death (not blue in this case).
It turns out that many Iraqis believe our soldiers have air-conditioned underwear and wraparound X-ray sunglasses.
I own no. 2 on this list, and it’s a rather good movie.
Fun Flash toys.
A surprisingly excellent speech by Al Gore. If he had been this eloquent when he was running for President, he might’ve won the popular vote. Oh, wait a minute … (By the way, after looking at that table, I have to say … a little under of half of America just sucks for not voting.)
This has to be the most poorly thought out piece of crap I’ve read in a while, and it takes a position I agree with. Just to show I can be a critic of my own side, too …
The Baghdad Blogger begins a photo blog …
Remember my August 5 comments on how much of an idiot Lieberman was for his ‘ticket to nowhere’ remark? Evidently, most Farkers agree.
However, the best retort was that of Jon Stewart on the August 5 Daily Show:
“Yes, Dean could lead the Democrats into an unforgiving wilderness where they would have no control over the White House, both houses of Congress, or the Supreme Court.
“Oh, wait. Never mind. It appears they’re already in the wilderness. I wonder who led the Democrats there?
“(Gore/Lieberman ‘02 logo appears over Lieberman’s photo.) Oh, right!”
Or, as Doonesbury put it …
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I’m sure you have already heard about this, but in case you haven’t, Mars will be the closest it’s been to Earth in literally hundreds of thousands of years on August 27, 2003.
Yes, you too can be a porn director!
I remember this movie, and the review nails it right on the head.
How idiotic is it that the Secret Service was called out to investigate a political cartoonist? And how culturally bankrupt is the Administration when they can’t even recognize the source material? Geez Louise, the cartoon was actually supportive of Bush; I imagine that cartoonist may be rethinking his politics. Someone’s interesting comments on the whole affair.
A frozen pastry! AHH! RUNNNN!!! (It all seems vaguely Monty Pythonesque by this point.)
PubMed: “He had a para-sagittal craniotomy and a 14 cm ball-point pen was found lying between the two cerebral hemispheres. This was removed and the patient made an uneventful recovery. This is the first report of an attempted suicide by transnasal insertion of a ballpoint pen intracranially.”
Looks like Gigli may be one of the bigger movie bombs in history — Sony’s even yanking all its advertising. Doesn’t fare well for Jersey Girl, I think.
Sometimes, words can’t adequately describe a link, and you just have to read it for yourself.
From Neil Gaiman’s journal … long, but definitely worth reproducing in its entirety …
Q: Regarding the case of Jesus Castillo. Have you found that things like this happen just as often outside of the United States? Or is this country really as conservative as it seems? Do things like this ever make you want to leave and move back to England? It’s disgusting that something like this could happen in the 21st century, will we ever grow up and join the enlightened people in this world?
A: Yes, things like this happen elsewhere. What’s important is that, in the US, you have a First Amendment — freedom of speech is a human right. And it’s down in writing. Guaranteed by law.
You also have people chipping away at that, continually. From the California Tax Authorities who decided that Paul Mavrides would make an excellent test case for their redefinition of comics from literature to sign-painting, to the nightmarish Kafkaesque judgement on poor Mike Diana (among the things that the judge ordered were that Mike be fined a thousand dollars, sentenced to a year’s suspended sentence, forbidden to be within ten feet of anyone under 18, and, most scarily, forbidden to write or draw anything anyone might find obscene even for his own amusement — with the local police ordered to make random unnanounced 24 hour spot checks on his place of residence to make sure he wasn’t secretly creating art and disposing of the evidence…).
You also have people who redefine Freedom of Speech as Freedom of the Sort of Speech that doesn’t make them uncomfortable. (As in “Well, yeah, I’m for Freedom of Speech, but Mike Diana’s comics are just icky.”)
There’s a reason why some of the fund’s biggest supporters have been foreign, I suspect, which is that we know what it means not to have Freedom of Speech guaranteed.
I like the First Amendment. I think it may be one of the best things that America has. It’s an ideal, and like all ideals, it may be let down by individuals (there’s a reason why the ALA has a Banned Books Week page — and it’s an eye-opener) but that doesn’t make it any the less important or meaningful or less worth fighting for.
I very nearly sent a publisher in Sweden to prison, for printing a bible story I had retold (the story, from the Book of Judges, contains a very nasty rape and murder*, which we depicted as a very nasty rape and murder) which fell foul of a Swedish law forbidding the depiction of violence against women. Sandman was seized several times by the police in the UK (where the UK Customs were seizing Robert Crumb books as obscene at the same time that BBC2 was screening a documentary on Crumb’s art). It’s no better elsewhere, and often it’s worse…
I don’t recommend leaving — or at least, not because you see the walls closing in. I recommend making your voice heard, instead. Writing to your representatives and voting are two really good ways to start. Support organisations that stand for the same things you do.
The most interesting thing about the CBLDF is that it is an unbelievably broad church politically — from far left to far right to Moderates and Don’t Knows and Out on the Absolutist Fringes; the only thing that unites the members (and the board, and the board of advisers) is faith in the medium, and in the First Amendment.
‘Cyberkim,’ Webmaster, Donald Rumsfeld Fan Page: “Still, I’d like to give a chance to all (female) Rummy fans to learn a bit more about their idol and download some pictures, because I wish somebody had built a Don Rumsfeld fan page back in December ‘01 when I started to look for pictures of him.”
Rather disheartening, from the BBC:
Cockpit tape recordings appear to contradict the popular perception that passengers forced the crash of Flight 93 to avoid the plane being flown into a landmark building in Washington, they say.
[...]
“As described by the FBI director [Robert Mueller],” says the 858-page report, “the cockpit tape recorder indicates that a hijacker, minutes before Flight 93 hit the ground, ‘advised [hijacker Ziad] Jarrah to crash the plane and end the passengers’ attempt to retake the plane’.”
Still, if you think about it, it was still heroic: even if the hijackers crashed the plane, they did so to avoid the passengers retaking the plane. That means that the passengers were still pretty much directly responsible for it reaching its destination …
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“Arnold Schwarzenegger: Finally, a public official who can explain the administration’s social policies in the original German.”
— Bill Maher
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Well, flippin’ good grief. As if this doesn’t sum up why I really like Dean, here’s Senator Joseph Lieberman’s view on him: “A candidate who opposed the war against Saddam, who calls for repealing all the Bush tax cuts, which would result in a tax increase on the middle class … could lead Democrats back into the political wilderness. It could be a ticket to nowhere.”
(Imagine a very sarcastic voice here.) Oh, my God! Oh, golly gee whillikers! Yes, standing up for everything that differentiates us from the Republicans could be a ticket to nowhere!
In other words, they so very much want the 2004 election that they’re going to stand for NOTHING, in the hopes of offending few and thus somehow … sliding into office on people voting against Bush and not for them?
If that doesn’t sum up the problems with modern politics in one nice, clean nutshell, then I don’t know what does.
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Cool.
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Heh.
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I have a pretty high tolerance for saccharine cuteness. This caused me to need a plunger full of insulin.
Heh heh. This reminds me of some Tex Avery cartoons. A little R-rated.
Damn!
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True enough. Chicago’s good that way:
I had to stand up on the el yesterday afternoon, which only made things worse. It’s one time when I really wish that I were not an incognito pregnant woman, because do you know what el passengers do for obviously pregnant women? They let them sit down. I see it time and time again. It’s a rare vestige of el train courtesy.
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February 1950 Popular Mechanics‘ view about what 2000 would be like. Um, little off.
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Three hundred reasons why God exists. It’s not what you think; this appears to have been written by a horde of atheists, but it’s nevertheless damn funny.
If we go to e-voting, we need a paper trail generated for each vote … a receipt, in other words. Right now, it looks like we’re not getting it. An election could be stolen quite easily …
Slashdot: “A chance discovery by Xerox lets printers superimpose glossy images on regular printouts, creating the possibility for document authentication along the lines of holograms on credit cards. The new technology, called Glossmark , can use ordinary office printers to superimpose a glossy image on an ordinary printed document in a way that can’t be photocopied or otherwise easily reproduced.”
CNN: Teen uses cell phone camera to have attempted abductor arrested.
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The guys from Swingers now look a little more upscale than they used to, don’t they?
My iBook’s predecessor.
You have to appreciate any song that contains the lyric ” … just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling … “.
You ever just wonder about the gossip out there? Evidently, it’s been collected all in one place. Bottle the nastiness of this stuff and it’d corrode faster than industrial acid.
Heavy D ain’t so heavy anymore.
Classic cartoons … censored?
Some really horrific crap going on in the news lately.
(1)
A law just passed by the Israeli legislature denies citizenship — or even the right to reside in Israel — to Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens. It doesn’t apply to foreigners, just to Palestinians. This essentially is a segregation law, if I understand it correctly.
(2) (link)
John: Thank you, sir. Mr. President, many of your supporters believe that homosexuality is immoral. They believe that it’s been given too much acceptance in policy terms and culturally. As someone who’s spoken out in strongly moral terms, what’s your view on homosexuality?
President: Yes, I am mindful that we’re all sinners, and I caution those who may try to take the speck out of their neighbor’s eye when they got a log in their own. I think it’s very important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country. On the other hand, that does not mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on an issue such as marriage. And that’s really where the issue is heading here in Washington, and that is the definition of marriage. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.
(3) (link)
“If it is true that all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are obliged to do so in a particular way, in keeping with their responsibility as politicians. Faced with legislative proposals in favour of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are to take account of the following ethical indications.
“When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.”
Note footnote no. 17: “It should not be forgotten that there is always ‘a danger that legislation which would make homosexuality a basis for entitlements could actually encourage a person with a homosexual orientation to declare his homosexuality or even to seek a partner in order to exploit the provisions of the law’ (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Some considerations concerning the response to legislative proposals on the non-discrimination of homosexual persons [July 24, 1992], 14).”
<sarcasm>Well, oh my f—king goodness, we couldn’t have that, could we.</sarcasm>
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There’s something categorically odd about watching O.J. Simpson get oil blown all over his head and the following scene with him yelling as things get slammed into his crotch underneath the car on “Naked Gun 2 1/2″ …
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