I just watched “Rock the Vote”, where eight of the Democrats running out Bush where asked questions by the audience.  Four admitted to having smoked marijuana.  (Technically, Braun, one of the last to be asked, refused to answer with a laugh that implied that she had but to keep it to ourselves.)  I’m sure there will be lots of commentary on the news tomorrow.

It seems that ??? (from the previous post, so read the section below this first) was an experiment created by someone that won Europe’s “Top Talent Award“.

I’m guessing that the ??? link is a copy of the original Samorost.  It was fun, nice and short.  But in researching what it was, I found TimeHunt.

There goes the rest of the day.  No, it’s even worse: they say it takes a year to solve it.

Terry sent a bunch of links that I finally got around to checking out.  The fun one was was the Reaction Timer (flash required).

The others, well, you be the judge:  http://www.shotglasschess.com/customer/home.php, http://www.belch.com/, http://www.awfulplasticsurgery.com/, http://www.pottypager.com/different.htm, and last but not least http://daimaoh.kir.jp/ho/menssom.htm.

I don’t even want to know how he found some of them.  But that begs the questions, how did I find this:  ???, and what is it?  (Don’t forget to click after you go there.)

On November 23rd, after an absence of almost ten years, Opus returns to the nation’s Sunday comic pages.  No word about Bill the Cat.

Here are some clues, if you need them:  Bloom County.  Outland.  Ack.

The mojo article is from CNN.  I had assumed, without looking, that it was from The Onion.  No, what follows is from The Onion.  The text is copied here because Onion stuff goes away fairly quickly.

I’ve been a little busy watching news about the fires.  I also learned that it’s impossible to get news from TV until after it happens.  They were about ten to fifteen miles off on the fire location.  Surprise!  It’s in your backyard!

Well, not quite, but you get the idea.  There are also lots of other “I’ve been busy” things to put here, but I know that’s boring reading.  So I’ll skip that part.

Which brings us to the smoke.  Lots of it.  In some really cool pictures of the Simi Incident, as it’s now called.  If the specific link doesn’t work, try MODIS Fire Imagery

See what I’ve been putting up with?  All the smoke seems to be backed up before it goes over the Santa Monica Mountains.  That explains why I couldn’t breath or see the sun at all on both Sunday and most of today.  For some reason, most of it stayed higher in the air Saturday, which provided some nice pictures and kept it clear enough that I could see the flames in spite of what the TV news was telling me about how far away it was.

Thanks for the link, Terry.  Inspired to blog again!

Three days after a Princeton graduate student posted a paper on his Web site detailing how to defeat the copy-protection software on a new music CD by pressing a single computer key, the maker of the software said on Thursday it would sue him.

Links:  Yahoo, Washington Post, Forbes, CNN

The DMCA is at it again.  The instructions consisted of holding down the ‘shift’ key.

A pioneering elementary school district outside Chicago has been sued for installing a wireless computer network by parents worried that exposure to the network’s radio waves could harm their children.

Links:  Yahoo, MSNBC

What a great way to spend school funds.  Later, the parents will complain that their school isn’t providing internet access and that their children are receiving a substandard education.

British Pathe Film Archive has 12 million still images online that cover news, sport, social history and entertainment from 1896 to 1970.  The still images were scanned from the entire 3500 hour archive of the British Pathe newsreel, a movie theater news service that pre-dated television. 

It must be overused, because it’s very slow.

Spelling is easy, right?  At least it was until I started use a spell checker and forgot all the weird rules.  Or is that wierd?  I before E except…  But this is an exception to that rule.

This handy chart is a reminder of just how easy it is to spell correctly by sounding-it-out.

“A twenty dollar bill can be folded to show the Trade Center and the Pentagon in flames. The twenty dollar bill was changed in nineteen nintyfive. The designers and engravers of the Federal Treasury Department are certainly comprised of many Mason or others with Masonic connections.”

They even have a picture here.

The US seems to think that it’s a violation of NAFTA for Mexico to bottle it’s own tequila.  But that’s not really what I’m writing about.

Before I post something here, I try to find a permanent link.  That means I can’t use Yahoo or the LA Times links, but I do a search for the item to see who else is running it.

The results looking for the Tequila story just struck me as funny.  None of the major news publications are running it, but it’s big news in Montana, Taipei and Kansas City.  According to a Yahoo News search, the following are the only places that seem to be running this news:

Mexico seeks control over tequila bottling
Billings Gazette, MT – Sep 26, 2003
… Coleman said US bottling plants for tequila were operating in four states – California, Arkansas, Missouri and Kentucky. Cuervo, the …
       US, Mexico Tussling Over Tequila Bottles – Yahoo News
       Mexico attempting to block foreign bottling of tequila – Kansas City Star
       Mexico starts tequila battle as US makes margaritas – Taipei Times

Why is this news in Kansas or Montana, or especially in Taipei?

Part II

I ran across the definitions of some of the terms on Tequila labels that I should know, but wasn’t sure about.

• Anejo – Yeah, it should have a tilde.  It means “aged, but only for one year in oak barrels.
• Blanco – White, of course.  Fancy for “fresh from the still.
• Resposado – This translates to “rested”, but it means not quite aged.  It’s stored in wooden casks for two months to one year.

Somebody get me a lime.

A cute little site that has Lego renditions of topics like Ages of Execution, Torture Classics, Domestic Incidents, and Troubles Abroad.  Frisk also has a bunch of cartoons at ExtraBad

A few nice pictures of colored smoke.

Shrubya only has until 2004 to get more wars started.  At least he’s keeping busy:

The Bush administration said on Thursday that Iran had “one last chance” to comply with nuclear safeguards and threatened to take the dispute to the U.N. Security Council if Tehran refused.

I’ve been reading a lot about this subject lately, so much so that I know if I get started on it here it will be another 500 word explanation. I’ll just put some links with brief explanations, which is something I’ve been planning on for a week or so. But yesterday I saw a news article that no one seems to be picking up on, and I find it very odd that it isn’t big news. The headlines had appeared briefly on Yahoo News, then vanished. The following version is from a FOXNews article:

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton said the Bush administration is trying to impose a “radical right-wing agenda” on the United States and is attempting to dismantle social programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

A bold thing for the Senator to say, but it’s finally somewhat safe to do. Why? Because it’s one of the main premises in Paul Krugman’s book “The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century”. The book is number four on the September 28, 2003 NY Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller List. (Why this list is available five days before 9/28 is still a mystery.)

I discovered Krugman last week during an OCDish bout of political reading.

It started with Alan Sloan’s Newsweek article The Brainteaser of Deficit Math. He says that when “you’re finished adjusting for reality, the projected budget deficit is about $7.4 trillion, not the advertised $1.4 trillion.”

After reading about Deficit Math, I stumbled upon Maureen Farrell’s article “When Will Americans Realize They’ve Been Had?” It led directly to Paul Krugman, who mentioned the aforementioned Brainteaser article in one of the first of his articles that I read.

I like it when all the sources start pointing at each other. But I wondered who is this Krugman, someone who is getting a lot of press right now?

Paul Krugman is a Princeton University professor who pens a column for the New York Times, and is the author of a new book, “The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century”. That explained why there was so much press on him.

Much of what he has to say is in a lengthy September 14th NY Times article “The Tax-Cut Con“. It may still be available at the NY Times. If not, it has been republished many times on the web. There he makes his case that there is an antitax crusade being waged by the “Starve-the-Beasters”. Supply siders (remember Reaganomics) are their nice side that Starvers support to a degree because it furthers their goals. But the Starvers’ goal is to remove enough funding from everything else that programs like social security and Medicare have to be cancelled to continue funding schools and roads.

Here are a few more Krugman links:

Buzzflash interview published 9/11/03 – He views the Bush Cartel as “revolutionary power…a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.” This is another key point, one he got from an old book by Henry Kissinger.
This CalPundit interview explains the Kissinger concept. In part, it says:

“In the first few pages, Kissinger describes the problems confronting a heretofore stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a “revolutionary power” ? a power that does not accept that system’s legitimacy….” His description of the baffled response of established powers in the face of a revolutionary challenge is that “they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertions of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework”

It’s a lot clearer if you read the stuff around the part that I lifted.
Other sources include his web page, the unofficial Paul Krugman web page, and the article The ugly exploitation of Sept. 11.

If you only read one, read either the CalPundit or Buzzflash interview because they are fairly brief. If you have time, read The Tax Cut Con (pdf). I liked them enough that I ordered the book.

Oh well, it was 660 words even while I kept it brief.

Kaiju Big Battel is a live event series that revolves around tournament-style performances, which are a tongue-in-cheek hybrid of American pro-wrestling, Japanese-monster-movie mayhem, and lowbrow pop-culture.  Descriptions include:

“A celebration of weird Japanese pop culture-specifically kaiju (those big monsters like in Godzilla and Ultraman), bad Japanese-to-English translations and wrasslin’.”

“This phantasmagoric phenomenon is no backyard-bodyslam ballyhoo: more spoof than sport, with a cast more comic book incarnate than Spandexed superstars, it’s a self-contained, self-parodying universe.”

Essentially it’s a bunch of people that dress up in crappy foam rubber costumes and fight each other.  Surprisingly, they have their own website.

Researchers say they have found fossils for a nine foot long, 1,545-pound giant that thrived millions of years ago in a swampy South American forest.  They even drew a picture of it.

The largest living rodent is another South American animal, the capybara, which can weigh up to 110 pounds.  Maybe I won’t complain about my gophers anymore.

This just in from the Onion’s front page:

Revised Patriot Act Will Make It Illegal To Read Patriot Act
WASHINGTON, DC�President Bush spoke out Monday in support of a revised version of the 2001 USA Patriot Act that would make it illegal to read the USA Patriot Act. “Under current federal law, there are unreasonable obstacles to investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, including the public’s access to information about how the federal police will investigate and prosecute acts of terrorism,” Bush said at a press conference Monday. “For the sake of the American people, I call on Congress to pass this important law prohibiting access to itself.” Bush also proposed extending the rights of states to impose the death penalty “in the wake of Sept. 11 and stuff.”

As a funny (?) aside showing truth can be stranger than fiction, the building codes that most cities have are derived from a book that is copyrighted.  It’s illegal to make copies, so there’s no way to learn what the law is without buying the book, or looking at the one copy that resides at your local city hall.

The Mayo Clinic is asserting that high blood-pressure and arterial plaque are not significant risk-factors for aortic aneurysms (though they are risk factors for other conditions).  The full article is here.