Special request to all the pundits out there:

Let us put to rest the hackneyed phrase "There is no there there." Why? Because whenever you send it out into battle, I take it to mean "I don't really know how to refute your claim/argument/rant/recipe through logic and reason. THPPT!" Now, is that what you're going for?

 
"My bank card functions as both a 'credit' card and a 'debit' card, but no matter how I use it, it still takes money out of my account."

That's Deep. In fact, it's almost as deep as my credit report is thick.

 
"A travel agency that specializes in clothing-optional vacations has chartered a 172-seat Boeing 727 for a flight from Miami to Cancun in May. Once the plane reaches its cruising altitude, passengers will be invited to disrobe."

I must admit it could lessen the chance of a terrorist hijacking.

An FAA spokesperson notes there are no regulations banning nudity aboard aircraft, stating "[i]t's not a safety issue." That depends on your definition of safety, now doesn't it.

 

Looks like the Germans have mixed up Monty Python and Aesop, again (posted to make up for the lack of one on the human pincushion).

 
The Needleboy of Manitoba:

""Holy crap," Moffatt said after inserting the 201st needle into his left leg. "This is something you don't do everyday.""

Probably the first smart thing to come into his head in a long time. Normally I'd post an image of the loon, but I've got to look at this blog several times a day!

 
Today is National Nothing Day. I really do prefer the easy to celebrate holidays. Also, today covers, among the obvious, the following:

Religious Freedom Day (World Religion Day is up tomorrow)
Book Publishers Day
National Good Teen Day
There's No Business Like Show Business Day (there really isn't)
National Fig Newton Day

For those who find ways to combine your celebrations of these into one big party, congrats. Enjoy the Fig Newtons. My favorites for tomorrow:

Fire From the Sky Day (???)
National Hot Buttered Rum Day

Yum. Hot buttered rum. Gotta have a day for that.

 
Today I am 13,880 days old. I don't feel a day over 10,958.

 
Hehehe.

 
Here in the US, we're beginning to grow tired of our two-party system, where the Democrates and Repbulicans rule the nest.

Suggestion: rather than the usual rigamarole of political debates, perhaps West Virginia candidates can take a spelling bee. Seems like it would at least be more entertaining for the voters.

 
You see, when there are serious money problems, it's the sex that suffers.

 
Nineteen Greenpeace 'operatives' effectively strolled into the Sizewell nuclear facility (nucular to Gee Dubya) in the UK early Monday morning. Undetected. Then several of them climbed up onto the reactor dome. You know, where all the really dangerous, radioactive stuff is housed. Thankfully, they were only interested in taking tourist snapshots; but this is now the second time Greenpeace has been in there.

Heard any of this from the "primary" news sources over the past few days?

See the Greenpeace UK article on all this. In the unlikely event any press happen to stumble across this, they also provide a Flash animation of the event aimed at your level of comprehension.

 
What's worse than a bad joke? A bad haiku joke.

The web link above
Was not a find of my own
It's from riley dog

 
From here on in, you'll find much longer posts from me on guff(zilla - until a better solution comes along), because I totally agree with this:

"Via Brad DeLong, I found this interesting piece about "linkrot" on the WWW from Idle Words.

Reading [old weblog] posts is like looking through an old scrapbook, where the writing is clear but the pictures have all bleached to white. The further back you go in the past, the fewer working links you can find. 'Permalinks' to other boggers get broken as people change ISPs, domain names, or software. Links to novelty sites and flavors of the month dry up; links to bubble-era dot coms have gone down with the ship. 'Permanent' links to news sites get retired to a polite 404 every time the software changes.

The irony here is that most of this content still exists. More things get moved around than disappear, and much of what is really gone still lives on in the Internet Archive. But the cost of finding that information skyrockets once a link goes down. Something as simple as a tabbed interface made a difference to thousands of web users because it became easier to open new links. By the same token, any rotted link throws up a wall to the user. Even a custom 404 with a good search box on it, guaranteed to find the content you are after, is no match for a working link. And very often the link is an integral part of the content. Just think of dear old Suck, itself now defunct, where the links were their own commentary. Try reading a few of their back issues from 1998 and see if you can find anything in that link graveyard.

The obvious solution, from a private weblogger's point of view, is to quote at great length [emphasis is mine], like Brad makes a practice of doing. This eliminates the problem of broken links entirely, but, if you are looking to this whole internet/hypertext thing as the wave of the future, it presents a couple of problems.

First of all, it looks an awful lot like plagiarism. For the individual weblogger, who has an audience in the hundreds or, at most, the thousands, it's not really a big deal, because who cares? It's hard to imagine the NY Times giving a shit that I quoted 3 paragraphs the other day in my silly not-for-profit barely-for-reading website, but if I were to take a few paragraphs from a few stories and begin selling a print version of this, even if I footnoted accurately and wrote "Word!" and "That's stupid!" or whatever it is I say here, even then, I can't imagine it would be long before the lawyers showed up at my door. I think there's also a certain amount of protection afforded by the notion that the rules for copyright on the internet are still evolving to some workable state, so it doesn't make sense to strenuously pursue violations* of laws which may not even be applicable in 5 years, or 5 months. But still, if we want to give people the option of retaining some control over their intellectual property (which we do, if we want the internet to become the default repository for information), encouraging massive duplication of other people's work.

More fundamentally, though, while de-centralized duplication offers some robustness, it is horrible configuration management. Having multiple copies of documents floating around seriously undermines the authority of any that document. How do I know that what you are showing me is really the latest version of that document? How do I know that that document hasn't been altered by you, or by someone unknown to either of us twenty copies ago? What we have now is configuration management done privately by the author, where everything is decentralized, but the author promises that, while he or she will may alter the document, and may not mention that he or she has done so if the changes are minor, people can have confidence that the dope will always be found at the same address. This is a pretty effective system, except that there is no guarantee that the author will care to keep it available for years.

The problem is that the de-centralized nature of the internet makes really rigorous configuration management impossible, which is unfortunate, because one thing computers are really good at is automated data management. The ideal situation would be to have links be pointers to files themselves, rather than addresses that can change, although what the hell that might actually mean in nuts-and-bolts is way over my head. An easier, and probably currently practicable way to combat linkrot would be to use periodic archiving of the entire internet. Archiving would occur, say, every 6 months, and a link would include the date at which the link was made. If the date in the link was more than 6 months old, the link would send you to the most recent archive; if it was more than a year, it would take you the archive before that, and so on. This wouldn't solve everything, of course: someone would have to take responsibility for serving this huge archive, and people's copyright would have to be respected by the archiver (ie not allowing the archive to serve NY Times articles which have lapsed into pay-per-view status). Probably there's someone out there who has developed some fiendishly clever way of doing the same thing in a de-centralized way, because these computer people are awfully clever, but in any case, if the internet is going to become a reliable way of transferring and storing information (though not necessarily reliable information), at some point there needs to be an evolution in this direction."

Visit The Poor Man to see the footnote.

 
You're aware of the sex abuse scandals involving Catholic priests in the US. All pretty terrible, to say the least. But now they're stealing from the collection plate. Ok, just one is - so far as we know. And from the xmas eve offerings, no less.

Now, how many commandments left before they run out?

 
PBS' Media Matters this week will be talking about weblogs and webloggers (i.e. blogs and bloggers). Mainly, it appears they'll offer up bobblehead shots of webloggers discussing what a weblog is. Here's hoping the online clip is not the whole story and that they provide a good deal more time actually discussing it, because even though weblogs are "a web page where the entries are mutually short and...in chronological order" (Glenn "Blogfather" Reynolds), there's a lot more of it out there than 81 seconds worth of bad dictionary definitions.

A few personal comments:

• The show airs on my birthday. Coincidence? You decide.
• They chose not to talk to me. They're smarter than I thought.
• What the hell is that stupid thing at the beginning of the spot supposed to be? A crystal ball? And are the webloggers sitting in it? Jesus...

 
"Doctors have said twins being born to different fathers is extremely rare."

I say: double the fun, double the diapers, and double the child support.

 
Homophonic Truism:
When stuck on something to talk about, talk about the whether.