Holy Mackerel Catfish

646 pounds of whiskered fish.

You Can Say That Again, Clarence

Justice Thomas, dissenting on the Kelo decision:

Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’'s interpretation of the Constitution.

This term of the Supreme Court seems to be batting a thousand.

UPDATE: CafePress is now offering products around this future famous quote.

The Lazarus Treatment

Scientists in Pittsburgh have developed a method where they are able to raise canines from the dead.

Pet Sematary, here we come.

Spring Makes A Delivery Under Our Deck

This spring has brought us a little gift under our deck. We had noticed a couple weeks ago that a bird had built it's nest here on the top of the wall directly under the sun porch. Apparently those eggs got busy.

I'm completely bird ignorant, so I don't know what these are. I do know that they appear to be raised by both parents rather than just the mother. When I went to snap this photo there were two unhappy parents behind me.

666 PWR

Ann T. Christ apparently drives a red Dodge Avenger and eats lunch on Sundays at It's Only Natural in Middletown, CT. Even more compelling is that this picture was indexed as IMG_03666 by my digicam.

At least she has good tase. ION is a vegetarian restaurant that attracts the crunchy types hanging in and around Wesleyan University. The food is generally pretty good, and good for you.

Don't Click It

A Web Project designed for getting the user to navigate without clicking the mouse button.

Interesting for, say, an interface that primarily provides content, but not very useful for applications where you need to get work done.

Chromatherapy Light Shower

Perfect for singing "I Will Survive" when you shower.

Disgraceful

I haven't found too many folks today that think today's Supreme Court decision wasn't an atrocity.

I would be very interested in hearing about the businesses that plan on opening on that land... so that I may boycott them.

Sauron, Courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope

Vietnam PM Meets With REAL World Power

Who cares about meeting the President of the United States when you can score a meeting with Bill Gates?

Ann T. Christ Visits the Mazda

That is a 1 at the front, of course.

Back By Popular Demand

My portrait, of course. What's cooler than a monkey?

I also made some other tweaks "behind the scenes" to handle the links on the right. They are all in an XML file now so I can add them easier. So are the random taglines at the top.

These little bits are written in .Net. Eventually I'll wean myself completely off Blogger.

The Google Wallet Is Coming

A rival to eBay's Paypal service is coming.

Google is quickly becoming the next big ape in the Information Technology arena.

The Retro Rotary Cell Phone

This solves the problem of properly slamming the phone on somebody when on a cell call.

Winner of the "What Can You Hemi?" Contest

Remember the What Can You Hemi? contest? The winner has been announced:

The Ultimate Office Prank

2000 superballs dumped on your cube/office/apartment/flat mate.

Evolution a Threat to Religious Belief?

The Volokh Conspiracy tackles this subject, and leaves commenting open.

Some pretty good discussion there from what seems like mostly level-headed folks.

Lemmings

An old favorite you can play completely in DHTML.

ARE U DUMB?

No, silly, I'm not talking about Jimmy Chu's little test, but how your state did in the annual Smartest State Award.

Iraqi Children Comment On the Jackson Ruling

"Salary Commiserate With Experience"

You'd think with a salary like that there's wouldn't be a whole lot of commiserating going on. Man, maybe I should be applying.

Sweet

Holographic data storage on credit card sized media. Here's to hoping that they figure out how to boot off this device and end my whining for solid-state storage.

Interesting price model -- $1800 bucks for the reader, one dollar for a card.

Don't Stop Believin'

A moving tribute to Episode IV. Make sure you at least hang around for Chewbacca's guitar solo.

Cell Phones As Door Unlocker

Ah, cell phones. Use them to talk on your landlines at home, to control your servers, pay for parking, and now to unlock the front door.

Got Extra Case Fans?

This guy may give you an idea on what to do with that case of extra computer fans...

The Corporate Fallout Detector

This seems more like an April Fool's Joke, but even if it isn't I'm not sure I'm keen on the idea of spending 10 times the amount of time grocery shopping, scanning every prospective product on the shelf:

The Corporate fallout Detector scans barcodes off of consumer products, and makes a clicking noise based on the environmental or ethical record (selectable via the "sensitivity" switch) of the manufacturer. It explores issues of corporate accountability and individual choice. Due to increasingly complex global supply chains, a single product we buy may contain parts made by various companies all over the world. We may agree with the business practices of some of these companies, while not with others. The complexity of the relationships between manufacturers can be so great that it becomes unclear how to translate our personal convictions into good buying decisions, and all purchasing decisions involve an unavoidable element of risk.

Hide the Children

A blog that keeps track of outrageous eBay auctions.

World's Biggest Computer Hacker Busted

Gary McKinnon of London is being extradited to the U.S. for allegedly causing $1 billion (that's pronounced beelyun) dollars worth of computer damage to the Pentagon & NASA:

Prosecutor Paul McNulty alleged that McKinnon, known online as "Solo," had perpetrated "the biggest hack of military computers ever". He was named as the chief suspect after a series of electronic break-ins occurred over 12 months at 92 separate US military and Nasa networks.

McKinnon was also accused of hacking into the networks of six private companies and organisations.

It is alleged that he used software available on the internet to scan tens of thousands of computers on US military networks from his home PC, looking for machines that might be exposed due to flaws in the Windows operating system.

Many of the computers he broke into were protected by easy-to-guess passwords, investigators said. In some cases, McKinnon allegedly shut down the computer systems he invaded.

Why did he do it?

Friends said he was desperate to prove that the Americans had mounted a huge cover-up to deny his belief that aliens had visited earth.

His mom is quoted as saying she is sorry she bought the complete X-Files set for her son for Christmas.

We Were Here First

Little Green Footballs notes selective bias in the AP's reporting of the clothing wares of an Arab designer. I guess the main problem I have with the t-shirt that LGF uses as an example is not that it's labeled as part of a "non-political" line of clothing, but how embarrassingly uninformed the designer is. And how embarrassing it will be to the wearer of said t-shirt once they do become informed.

Not to fret. The Department of Freaking Perspective is offering an alternative model that is sure to set the wearer apart as informed, as well as set the record straight.

Here's One Way to Teach Kids About the First Amendment

A Tennessee elementary school barrs students from discussing the Bible during recess. Eugene Volokh comments:

I've long been appalled by the willingness of government officials to discriminate against religious speech this way. It's true that under the Court's Establishment Clause caselaw the government generally may not itself engage in religious speech (especially in K-12 schools), nor may it give preferential treatment to religious speech. But this ban on government preferences for religious speech doesn't require or authorize discrimination against private religious speech. Such discrimination is itself unconstitutional; it violates the Free Speech Clause, and in my view the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause as well (though that's less clear than the Free Speech Clause violation).

Free speech isn't so free, it seems. God comments:

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

Turnabout Is Fair Play

Now that Apple is going to put Intel Inside(tm), it's only fitting that somebody hacked their G3 into a P4.

What the Eckhay?

Did you notice that Google is in Pig Latin today?

+++

Phone line stretched across the house and plugged in to a lowly Volks Modem 1200 which was plugged into our Commodore 64. Parents yelling at me for the 300 dollar phone bills and busy signals on the phone line. Going in to church all zombie eyed on Sunday morning because I had been up all night making calls. Yes, it was the wonderful days of dialing Bulleting Board Systems when I was a teen.

Wired has a cute article on the beginnings of the wired world that began with BBS's some 25 years ago.

Don't Even Think Of Stealing That Car, Eh?

British Columbia funds the Bait Car Program, essentially a honeypot initiative to crack car thieves. The website includes videos of some of their busts.

Best Movie Lines

A truly entertaining blog post -- Ace of Spades readers chime in with their favorite movie lines.

The Bumper Dumper

It seems to be lacking a seat belt, however.

Holy Toilet Paper

Anybody else nauseated by the US's so-called torture of detainees from mishandling of the Koran?

Charles Krauthammer takes the MSM to task over this self-flagellation:

On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01.

Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.

Why this abjectness on our part? On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations.

Do read the whole thing.

Minh-Duc offers a similar perspective and encourages people not to dilute the meaning of torture.

That Kind of Sums It Up on Warren Sapp

From Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback:

"I hate him. He talks too much. He talks too much, he doesn't make sense, he's fat, he's sloppy, he acts like he's the best thing since sliced bread, he's ugly, he stinks, his mouth stinks, his breath stinks and basically his soul stinks too." -- Carolina defensive tackle Kris Jenkins on Oakland defensive tackle Warren Sapp.

The Zit Zapper

Now where was this thing when I was in high school? Alas, I would have burned that thing out in one use anyway.

Exxxcellent

There's a new top-level domain intended for use by the pornographic adult entertainment industry.

It would be nice if adult entertainment sites were forced to use that extension. It would make a netadmin's job of filtering web sites a whole lot easier.

1984 to be Installed In Your Car

Look what Poland is up to:

In Poland, the Ministry of Infrastructure dreams of satellite surveillance of drivers and has drawn highly ambitious plans for the coming decades stating that "the policy of the country is directed to introducing electronic road charging system". When asked how is he going to calculate the toll, the minister answers that it is possible with GPS so the state can require car owners to possess the system. In its "Country Transport Policy for the years 2005 - 2025", the ministry admits also that to fulfill the requirements of the European Commission the state will act to introduce such tax and fiscal policies that will restrict "an uncontrolled development of motorization".

That's, like, genuinely creepy.

"Rent" Movies For a Buck

Wired reviews a service called Peerflix, a peer-to-peer DVD swapping service. The idea is that you rent movies other people own, while you put your own DVD's up for grabs. I guess it's supposed to be a marriage of NetFlix and P2P services.

Personally, I have second thoughts about using a service whose name rhymes with "deer ticks."