Recently rec'd in my inbox as spam. Little did the Dadaists know that automatic writing would be used for such crass commerical ends:
An annoying graduated cylinder, a tuba player toward a power drill, and the demon are what made America great! When you see the anomaly, it means that the false reactor hesitates. A loyal defendant throws an overwhelmingly treacherous freight train at the avocado pit defined by a cheese wheel. The hockey player sells a college-educated blood clot to some skyscraper. An usually fashionable crank caseA spider over the cashier organizes the girl scout. If a non-chalantly incinerated insurance agent plays pinochle with an often fat tornado, then a scythe inside a dolphin gets stinking drunk. Furthermore, a wrinkled polar bear feels nagging remorse, and an overwhelmingly highly paid umbrella dances with the cashier. Any tape recorder can recognize an avocado pit, but it takes a real blithe spirit to plan an escape from a linguistic parking lot some buzzard toward a pig pen. The surly cargo bay requires assistance from a spider.
When a garbage can is ridiculously feline, another chess board over a wedding dress graduates from a highly paid carpet tack. Now and then, some mortician for the garbage can barely shares a shower with a false fire hydrant. When an orbiting buzzard trembles, a wheelbarrow hides. Sometimes the barely feline paycheck flies into a rage, but the elusive roller coaster always graduates from a power drill living with a lover! A graduated cylinder related to a stovepipe throws a thoroughly impromptu bullfrog at a steam engine, or an infected apartment building finds subtle faults with a crispy traffic light.
| Spam |
This Halloween, Ben and Zach decided they wanted to go as Pokémon characters. Ben will be Pikachu, Zach will be Growlithe. (Both are home-made duct tape, cardboard and fabric concotions.) I get to be Ash and Debbie will be an Officer Jenny.
Your cheap Pokémon costume tip of the day: A red and white fishing float, available at K-Mart, makes a pretty good Poké Ball.
Of course, you could always go as YouTube and be really "2.0". Maybe someone will give you a billion dollarz!
Happy Halloween! And for our pagan friends, a good Samhain to you!
| Halloween |
The situation in Darfur is complex and confusing. The government in Khartoum uses that to its advantage, hiding it's actions in the fog, much in the same way the Khmer Rouge and other genocidal actors did in times past.
One way to follow events, surprisingly enough, is in Jan Pronk's blog. Pronk is the UN special envoy to the Sudan and he's very outspoken for a man in such a position. The government has just kicked him out of the country for comments that he made in the blog, so I don't know how useful it will be from here on in, but I plan to go back and read his last year of posts. I can't believe I had no idea such a thing existed!
| United Nations |
In the last book in the Series of Unfortunate Events (which I have entirely missed), one finds this:
"Call me Ish," commands the latest supporting villain in the final book, the leader of an island cult whose followers drink coconut cordial rather than Kool-Aid.
Hm!
| Children's Books | Villains |
I was going to write something about the sudden political left-turn that Battlestar Galactica has taken, but Brad Reed did it for me.
| Iraq | War on Terror |
If you live in a democracy -- yes, I'm looking at you -- you have to go read this article on How to steal an election by hacking the vote.
What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company's internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that's only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn't want to believe me, and I don't blame you.So what if I told you that one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America's private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents' basement, and that many of the victims in the attack would never know that they'd been compromised? Before the rise of the Internet, this scenario also might've been considered alarmist folly by most, but now we know that it's all too real.
. . . .
So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.
Stokes goes on to demonstrate how our new reliance on electronic voting makes it not only easy for a single person (or small group) to change the outcome of an election, but also makes it impossible to tell that such a change has been made.
* Bits and bytes are made to be manipulated; by turning votes into bits and bytes, we've made them orders of magnitude easier to manipulate during and after an election. * By rushing to merge our nation's election infrastructure with our computing infrastructure, we have prematurely brought the fairly old and well-understood field of election security under the rubric of the new, rapidly evolving field of information security. * In order to have confidence in the results of a paperless DRE-based election, you must first have confidence in the personnel and security practices at these institutions: the board of elections, the DRE vendor, and third-party software vendor whose product is used on the DRE. * In the absence of the ability to conduct a meaningful audit, there is no discernable difference between DRE malfunction and deliberate tampering (either for the purpose of disenfranchisement or altering the vote record).
It continues to astound me that the richest democracy on earth cannot secure its own elections. I have more 50x confidence in an ATM than I do in a voting machine. Conspiracy Theory Mike says that's because politicians run the elections, and politicians like to steal elections, therefore they have no interest in a secured system. Cynical Mike says that we've just figured that we should get the best system money can buy, and therefore the highest price tag must mean the most secure system, and bingo, we turn our right to vote over to the private sector. (Cynical Mike also thinks that if an election is stealable, it will eventually be stolen.)
Idealistic Mike wants everyone to read this article and then leave a comment telling me what we can all do about it.
| Democracy | Hack | Voting | Diebold |
Most Popular Story - WFMY News 2 Shoe Salesman Knocks On Wrong Door, Sets Off Crazy Chain Of Events
Greensboro, NC -- A confusing shooting case in Greensboro Friday night landed a man in the hospital.The people involved told police a guy selling shoes knocked on the door of a vacant house on Hackett Street around 8:00pm.
The salesman says four men pulled him inside the house and locked him in a closet.
Then, the four went outside and tried to steal the shoe salesman's car. The salesman kicked his way out of the closet and used a lamp to smash his own car window as the four tried driving away and that's when they backed into a tree.
Seconds later, one of the men in the car shot at the salesman, but hit one of his buddies instead.
That gunshot victim ran onto Highway 29, got hit by a car and flagged down another car for a ride to the hospital.
But the first driver to stop refused to help him.
The second driver took him to a grocery store where he called for help.Police are still trying to figure out who will get charged.
Via woot.
| Stupid Criminals |
This story on Boing Boing on a new malware that kills other, "competing" malware with its own anti-virus program reminded me of the end of Dick's story Second Variety. I won't ruin it by telling you why but you can read this spoiler filled Wikipedia article if you want to.
| Philip K. Dick | Life Imitates Art |
And other six word long science fiction stories.
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Scott Adams went mute a year and a half ago. but oddly enough the muteness was contextual instead of total:
I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down ... The weirdest part of this phenomenon is that speech is processed in different parts of the brain depending on the context. So people with this problem can often sing but they can’t talk. In my case I could do my normal professional speaking to large crowds but I could barely whisper and grunt off stage. [Link]
So, like any good geek, Scott Adams hacked his own brain:
Continue reading "Behold - the amazing power of rhyme!" » | Dilbert | Brain | Psychology |
A tag cloud of the 100 most frequent words in Hamlet -- the Project Gutenberg edition, with header stripped out and character abbreviations changed to full names (e.g., "Polon." to "Polonius"). Generated by TagCrowd.
| Tags | Tag Clouds | Tufte Alert | Web Tools |
Two long pieces worth reading. Hell and Back chronicles a New Orleans reporter's fight with post-Katrina depression. (Via Obscure Store.) And Doonesbury's War is a piece on Garry Trudeau's career, focusing on his handling of the War in Iraq.
| Doonesbury | Hurricane Katrina | New Orleans | Iraq | War | PTSD | Depression |
Dario Fo said it best: "Who cares? the important thing is to have a good scandal... so we can say: 'It's true - we're in the shit right up to our necks, and that's precisely the reason why we walk with our heads held high!'"
| GOP | Scandal | Wadministration |
A lot of teachers at DonorsChoose ask for new textbooks. Cynical-C reports on an idea for using old textbooks: as self-defense shields from school shooters. File under: crazy.
Does remind me, however, of both the Bible stopped a bullet stories and their satirical versions.
| Guns | Education |
You're going to want to check this out. A really cool new music blog from a friend of mine here in Colorado and his two buddies. More stuff than I can even begin to keep track of. Go see the wonder that is Moving In Stereo.
| Blogs |
I recently finished Michael Chabon's The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, in which a retired Sherlock Holmes takes up a final case. This followed The Beekeeper's Apprentice, in which a retired Sherlock Holmes... well, takes up another case. I think enjoyed Beekeeper more -- it felt more A.C. Doylesian, while The Final Solution felt like, well, a Holmes story written by Michael Chabon. I'd recommend both, though, as Books to Borrow.
This brought to mind a question: are there any literary characters other than Holmes who have transcended their original authors? A character that other authors keep using? I mean there is Dracula, I suppose, but the vampire thing was being done long before Bram Stoker, right? Frankenstein (well, to be precise, Frankenstein's Monster) seems to show up a lot. I can't think of anyone else.
Anyway, in the back matter, Chabon shares his list of favorite "genre" writers. While several of them I know and have read (Raymond Chandler, Michael Moorcock, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard [Conan t.B.], Stephen King), there were several others I'd not heard of. Has anyone read any of these?
| Lists | Sherlock Holmes |
Devoted Ish-watchers may have noted that movie reviews have tapered off as of late. What, they ask, are you not watching movies any more? Did Netflix go out of business? Is the TV broken and beyond repair?
Au contraire, mon frere. We have been obsessed with Battlestar Galactica.
Flash back to 1978. I have been struck by a Cadillac. I am in the Intensive Care Unit of Bryn Mawr Hospital. I have a broken arm and a broken leg. My mom has brought in a portable TV into the ICU, against regulations. This is a portable TV in 1978, so it sports a tiny black and white screen that pops up when you push the top of the massively heavy case. Why has my mom brought a TV to the ICU? Because, although I was suffering from multiple fractures, I did not want to miss that week's episode of Battlestar Galactica. (Remember, this is before VCRs -- if you missed an ep, you really missed it.)
In retrospect, the original series was not that good. But for me, it was like watching Star Wars. Every week. On TV.
Fast forward to 2006. Debbie and I have been basically watching nothing but the new Battlestar series for many weeks now. And we're about to do something we haven't done since Buffy was on the air: we're going to watch a show while it's on the air.
It's that frakking good.
| Battlestar Galactica |
Kerim points us to "this editorial from the Johnson County Sun in Kansas explaining why they are breaking from a long tradition of endorsing Republicans in this year’s election."
The Republican Party has changed, and it has changed monumentally.You almost cannot be a victorious traditional Republican candidate with mainstream values in Johnson County or in Kansas anymore, because these candidates never get on the ballot in the general election. They lose in low turnout primaries, where the far right shows up to vote in disproportionate numbers.
To win a Republican primary, the candidate must move to the right.
What does to-the-right mean?
It means anti-public education, though claiming to support it.
It means weak support of our universities, while praising them.
It means anti-stem cell research.
It means ridiculing global warming.
It means gay bashing. Not so much gay marriage, but just bashing gays.
It means immigrant bashing. I’m talking about the viciousness.
It means putting religion in public schools. Not just prayer.
It means mocking evolution and claiming it is not science.
It means denigrating even abstinence-based sex education.
Note, I did not say it means “anti-abortion,” because I do not find that position repugnant, at all. I respect that position.
But everything else adds up to priorities that have nothing to do with the Republican Party I once knew.
That’s why, in the absence of so-called traditional Republican candidates, the choice comes down to right-wing Republicans or conservative Democrats.
And now you know why we have been forced to move left.
| GOP |
| MMORPG | Psychology |
Apple has come out with a red iPod to help fight AIDS in Africa. But is using an iPod "green"? Is it envrionmentally ok to use an MP3 player? The advantage of MP3 players (and not just iPods) is the decrease in plastic CDs. But since iPods commit suicide they need to be replaced, which is an environmental cost. Plus there's the environmental cost of backup (and DRM!)
"Rematerialising" your downloads into a CD at home not only completely negates any environmental savings, but is actually about three times as damaging as just buying the music on a CD in the first place.
The damage in this case coming from having to power the computer to burn the CD.
Colin? Chris? Any thoughts?
| MP3 | Environment |
While we are all waiting and hoping for Liz md H-P's sea monkeys to grow, I stopped over on the Wikipedia Sea-Monkey entry. (Think the Encycolpedia Galactica Britannica has an entry on Sea-Monkeys? I think not!)
There I discovered -- to my shock, shock! -- that there are deceptive practices afoot in Sea-Monkey world:
The key observation that allowed unhatched "Sea-Monkeys" to be cheaply packaged, shipped, and handled is that, in certain easily prepared environments, they enter cryptobiosis, a natural state of suspended animation. When released into their aquarium they leave this state and hatch.Basically, one adds a 'purifier package' on day one. The user is unaware that this package already contains eggs in addition to the salt. At day two, one adds the 'instant eggs package', containing epsom salts, borax and soda, in addition to eggs, yeast, and a blue dye. The blue dye is used to enhance the 'instant life' experience by making the freshly hatched animals more visible. The Sea-Monkeys seen during the second day after adding the 'eggs package' are derived from the eggs added with the 'purifier' package. The food package is a mixture of spirulina and dried yeast. The 'boost' packages mainly contain salts, which induce sexual activity in artemia.
I may never recover from this breach of trust in Harold von Braunhut, marketer of Sea Monkeys, X Ray Specs, "Invisible Goldfish." And member of the Klan, evidently.
| Pets | False Advertising |
In honor of the closing of CBGB's -- which, by the way, I never went to -- I played Richard Hell's "Blank Generation" really loud this morning.
On my iPod.
I am so old..
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Tony Blair has received a public warning from the country's most senior military commander that the British presence in Iraq is threatening disaster there and in the UK.General Sir Richard Dannatt, who took over as Chief of Staff six weeks ago, has warned the commitment to Iraq "exacerbates" problems faced by the UK in other parts of the world. He urged Mr Blair to give up his ambition to see a liberal democracy established in Iraq and settle for a "lower ambition", warning that British troops were not invited into Iraq and the time when they were welcome has passed. [Link]
This is a lot less important in the UK than it would have been in the US, but I think it may be the final nail in the coffin for Blair's Iraq policy, and possibly for Blair in general. I think we might see UK troops transfered to Afghanistan soon ...
| Afghanistan | Tony Blair | War | United Kingdom |
"You've got a silver nugget," said the Undergraduate Cousin to Debbie.
"A what?"
CULPA (the Columbia Underground Listing of Professor Ability) gives out Gold and Silver Nuggets (a clear reference, of course, to Columbia's role in the Georgia Gold Rush in of 1829) to the highest-rated professors as ranked by students. You can read Ph.Deb's reviews!
"If you are lucky enough to get Debra as your CC teacher, for God's sake don't switch out of her class. She is the best discussion-manager I have ever had at Columbia.... Don't be fooled by her modesty. This woman is sharp as a whip, and her insights will astound you.""Debra is such a great teacher! Many sophomores in Columbia College hate/hated CC, but i know that every single person in my class benefitted from this class, and took something from her class. She was able to make the philosophies that we discuss applicable to our daily lives, and there was not a single person in the class who did not take interest and become engaged in at least a handful of the discussions, regardless of how reticent they were."
"By the end of the year all of us were well aware of how lucky we had been getting Debra as out CC professor. She is incredible..... I would eat dirt for this woman!"
That dirt-eating part actually makes sense, but I don't want to give it away in case any of her students are reading this blog. (Not likely, but...)
See, I knew she was the best. Hey, yesterday was 16 years together. So I should know.
| Reviews | Shameless Self-Promotion |
"In other words, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning while on your way home from purchasing a winning Lotto ticket with your wife, Jessica Alba, the first lady of the United States."
Richard Roeper on the latest McDonald's contest, via Obscure Store and Reading Room.
| McDonald's | Statistics | Your Blank of the Day |
Yale Student's Resume Video Raises Wall Street Eyebrows - October 9, 2006 - The New York Sun
Thousands of Ivy Leaguers circulate their resumes each year to New York's investment banks, but few garner as much attention as Aleksey Vayner, who last week submitted an 11-page resume and video to UBS's human resources department.By the week's end, the Yale University senior's video had raised scores of eyebrows and sparked much laughter in nearly every firm on Wall Street.
Mr. Vayner identifies himself on his resume as a multi-sport professional athlete, the CEO of two companies, and an investment adviser. The video depicts him lifting a 495-pound weight, serving a tennis ball at 140 miles an hour, and ballroom dancing with a scantily clad female. Finally, Mr. Vayner emerges enrobed in a white karate suit and breaks six bricks in one fell swoop.
Between athletic bits, Mr. Vayner takes the opportunity to opine on success. After being described in the opening lines of the video as "a model of personal success and development to everybody," Mr. Vayner says, "Failure cannot be considered an option." He adds: "To achieve success you must first conceive it and believe in it. Remember: impossible is nothing."
Via Obscure Store. You can see the whole cringe-worthy video here.
| Job Seeking Follies |
Rebecca Blood has an interesting piece on "How Social Media Works." How an extremely informative forum post from a gate agent on how First Class upgrades really work is not only extremely valuable to the company but also how it's spread to other readers. What's interesting is the role of Google et al. in this process:
One or two other bloggers may have picked up the link from Rafe, and one or two may pick it up from me, and their (likely smaller) audiences have also generated a small percentage of click-throughs. Some readers may email it to their friends. Incrementally, the word about this site, and this specific forum, will spread.Also note that sometime yesterday, Google and Yahoo! and many others indexed my site, and Rafe's site, and from now on I'll receive visits from people who are on the Web searching for information on upgrades. The vast majority of my site traffic is not to my blog—it's to archived posts and essays, and the lists of resources I've put together on various subjects. That traffic comes primarily from search engines. People referred by search engines are (I would judge) highly likely to click through links, because they are actively looking for information on a specific topic.
Ishbadiddle also ends up getting most of its hits from search engines (lots of people looking for "Post Secrets" and, recently, image searches for "Justice League anime"). In the former case, the searchers have not only found something specific, they've created their own community -- 1254 comments and counting. In a way the search engines break down the conversation model of blogs by turning each post into a "node" that is independent of the overall blog. I wonder if any of the Secret-posters are reading the rest of Ish?
| Search | Search Engines |
I was doing work-related research (yes, I do!) and ran across this company that provides management services for professional associations. Their list of clients includes:
Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association
Association for Dressings and Sauces
Calorie Control Council
Comics Magazine Association of America
Concord Grape Association
European Association of Storage Battery Manufacturers
Horseradish Information Council
International Food Additives Council
International Glutamate Technical Committee
International Inflight Food Service Association
International Jelly & Preserve Association
Juice Products Association
Lignin Institute
National Association of Margarine Manufacturers
National Candle Association
National Institute of Oilseed Products
National Pasta Association
National Pecan Shellers Association
The Vinegar Institute
Weather Risk Management Association
Window Covering Manufacturers Association
Window Covering Safety Council
| Lists |
Vin Knight is appearing in "Gatz," an Elevator Repair Service show that stages the complete text of The Great Gatsby over seven hours. Now showing in Minneapolis.
Lisa Jolley is starring in "Jolley on the Spot," her improvised cabaret act, which is totally great. Mondays in October starting 10/9.
| Improvisation |
In honor of Chris K's birthday today, I'm finally getting around to posting this:
It's only been six months since the redesign of BreakupGirl.net, but it's been five years since I debuted a Pulp site and eight years since I updated my Spider Page!But now ...
THE SPIDER RETURNS!For the Pulp fans:
Over 100 pages of content, and more than twice that many images in the galleries! Plus brand-new and exclusive desktops, screensavers, interviews and essays! Over a year in the making!And for the non-fans:
Clean design with eye-popping "full-page" artwork! Feast your eyes on cool retro he-men and the hardboiled dames that love them! Turn off your popup-blocker and enjoy the occassional 1940s popup ad!Many happy Returns,
-- Chris
And many happy returns to you too Chris! Thanks for this labor of love.
| 1940s | Pulp Fiction |
So sayeth Mark, to whom I turn for his more-rightward-leaning-than-me political opinions. This time the GOP is in his sights -- for trying to restrict internet gambling:
Note to you jerks in Congress; you work for the American people. We do not work, or play, or do anything at all, for you. You are our bitches, do you understand?
For some reason I can't picture Frist delivering Samuel L. Jackson's "Do I look like a bitch?!" line from Pulp Fiction....
| Congress | Gambling |
Houston Community Newspapers Online - Parent criticizes book 'Fahrenheit 451'. Via waxy which provided this headline.
Your quote of the day:
"No matter how cynical I get, it’s hard to keep up."
-- Lily Tomlin
