The BlakeBlog

You probably didn't know that Bush apparently went AWOL (Dallas Morning News) from his Air National Guard duty in the 1970s. It was covered by a few newspapers, but the story disappeared after he claimed he couldn't remember what happened. Right. "I can't remember what I did, but I wasn't flying because they didn't have the same airplanes. I fulfilled my obligations."�

He also apparently skipped a medical exam that required a drug test.� Can you say special treatment?

While I'm at it, both these items are mention in this article about why we're really going to Iraq.

It seems like it takes almost all day to read the Sunday paper. So, just how much stuff is in there? What if it was in book format instead of that thing that takes over the floor or couch or sometimes both?

If this Sunday's LA Times was put into a standard size paperback book format, it would be over 2,500 pages long. And it would have a second 1,250 page supplement to cover the classified, jobs and cars ads. Yeah, there are lots of full page ads (each taking almost 13 paperback pages) that you would just skim through, but that's still a lot of reading material. And the page count doesn't include any of the extras like ad or magazine inserts.

The Times was made up of a 200 page main paper with another 100 pages of classified and car ads. Just a coincidence, or is it this size all the time? Stay tuned.

Q: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
A: Who cares, they're both delicious!

Somebody that's offended by PETA's latest advertising campaign came up with this great idea for today.  Too bad I found out too late and don't have any meat in the fridge.  Yeah, that will be the day.  They've even got a letter to PETA and addresses to send it.

I think it's time to go heat up some sausage...

Ten Second Films. They require a lot of bandwidth: cable and DSL are considered slow.

It's about the size of a small lemon and weighs in at about half an ounce. I guess they really are mostly air. It made it onto CNN.

"We call it Seasoning Accumulation," a Chee-tos Development Manager said. (Uh, why is there a Chee-tos Devolpment Manager?) "If you love cheese, this is the Chee-to for you. It's beyond dangerously cheesy."

Mmm, seasoning accumulation.

This is just a start, but I wanted to get the initial page posted. There's a lot more to read on HCA's main site. The bill (SB 921) has been introduced. There is activity taking place. GO. Read. Join.

Disturbed, from A to Z: link

Forfeiture laws are great for the government:� none of that messy court and lawyers stuff.� Just accuse someone of a crime and take their stuff.� There's more about forfeiture elsewhere on this website.� Now there's something�new being appropriated:� domain names.� In two separate cases last week, the Justice Department seized domains for web sites that it claimed were engaging in illegal activity.

In one of those cases, the sites were�allegedly used to sell drug paraphernalia such as bongs and roach clips.� Visitors are now greeted with a message from the government.� So what's the big deal?� The Justice Department's privacy policy allows it to hand over information it collects from people visiting seized web sites to "appropriate law enforcement officials" for criminal prosecution.�

It's legal to read any web site (with the possible exception of one with child porn), but in our new security-conscious climate it's easy to imagine the Justice Department assuming the worst about an innocent visitor and not be terribly sensitive to their First Amendment rights.� There are clear notices on the sites that the government seized last week.� But you won't see them if you send an e-mail, and any that is sent to the postmasters and Webmasters of those sites is now read by the Justice Department.

Read more at the ZDNet article: Police Powers Move Into Your Browser.

From a Sacramento Business Journal article: Double-digit percentage premium increases continue to pay off for the three big for-profit HMOs in Greater Sacramento � their combined net profits for 2002 are up 74 percent from 2001.

I guess that explains why my insurance premiums went up over 25% in less than two months. Too bad the money isn't going to health care. A for-profit system doesn't make sense when it comes to medicine.

Ganguro are Japanese girls who try to look black (at least that's one opinion out there). Here's a page of ganguro girl pics.

I was wondering if there was a name for the style.

"Who is Tom Glazer, you ask? He was a silly folk singer who wrote and recorded the classic song 'On Top of Spaghetti'." Okay, I didn't know both that he died last week and that he wrote the song until today. But I did recognize this delightful ditty of his:

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where Hydrogen is built into Helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

My good friend Rich put it on a tape that he made and now it is forever etched into my memory. Here is a low bandwidth mp3 to listen to.

You can find more MP3s of Glazer's work (written by Lou Singer and Hy Zaret) at http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs/.

Reuters: "A lawyer was arrested late Monday and charged with trespassing at a public mall in the state of New York after refusing to take off a T-shirt advocating peace that he had just purchased at the mall." Link

Almost everybody I talk to is feeling overwhelmed in one way or another. Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 book Future Shock, says that some of the problem has to do with our inability to cope with the pace of rapid decision making. He says that people feel "that the world has become so fast that there isn�t time to think through the complexities of the decisions they need to make."

Politicians are having the same problem. He says, "I know some elected representatives who say they can�t assimilate all the information they need to make truly informed decisions, so their staff makes the decisions on most issues. To which I replied, 'Exactly who elected your staff?'".

Read the a slightly old (Sept. 2000) but interesting Toffler interview by Business2.0 magazine.

An interesting quote from the Forbes WEF article linked to in the "bcc: Everybody..." blog, below:

Hotmail, Microsoft's free e-mail service, has 200 million users, but 30% to 40% of the cost goes to delivering messages they don't want, thanks to an all-time peak in spam.