Nigerian banking spam, as read to you personally by the inimitable zefrank. Hilarious.

How can you not love the protections of a quasi-govt. job? Bean counters tucked away somewhere in the bowels of UC Berkeley came across some particularly useful information for those of us putting our digits on the line for the cause of higher education. Summary:

Try not to lose the “thumb and index finger of the same hand.” You would only be entitled to 1/4 the principal sum of your traveler’s insurance. Losing four toes, on the other hand, gets you 1/2 the sum,but only if you lose those toes “through or above the metatarsophalangeal joints.”

Table of losses / payments broken down by number of digits on involved hands or feet follows.
(more…)

After years of heading to snopes.com to check the credibility (or non-credibility) of forwarded emails making surprising claims, and politely reminding people that not everything one reads online is true, I just got snoped. An old friend forwarded a message from a seemingly very experienced earthquake and disaster relief expert with some very credible-sounding advice. Even though the advice ran counter to what most of us learned in school (it implores people not to hide under desks or in doorways but to huddle next to large objects instead, where triangular pockets will be formed by falling rubble), all of it sounded like good sense, and the guy’s experience sounded vast. So I forwarded it on to a bunch of friends.

As it turns out, “rescue expert” Doug Copp has a less-than-sterling reputation, the Red Cross disputes that techniques that may apply in 3rd-world countries will apply in countries with very different building standards, the scientific validity of his claims is in question, and he’s currently under investigation by a U.S. Department of Justice fraud unit.

I think part of the reason the article didn’t raise a bull flag for me is that it didn’t seem like anyone had an agenda at stake, anything to gain from giving bad earthquake advice.

Lesson learned: Snopes everything.

Now that MT-Blacklist is available for Movable Type 3.1, decided it was time finally to go for it. But upgrading the back-end and keeping the old templates locks you out of some of the coolest new features. And I’ve been wanting to move to the new date/slug-based URL format (rather than entry ID-based), so that URLs are not broken when databases are re-populated (e.g. when moving to a new host, or running an export/import).

Rather than mess around upgrading old templates, decided to start fresh with all-new templates. Which in this case look shockingly like the old templates. A few tweaks remaining, but good enough for jazz. Apologies to anyone who tried to leave comments today.

Cosmetic changes aside (comments on the new look welcome), this change lays the groundwork to enabling MT3’s PHP hooks, so I’ll soon be making permalink and category archives, monthly archives, and comments dynamic, which will mean near-zero delays when commenting, and reduced server load on publish.

Most glaring remaining bug: Old comments are in the database, but not showing up attached to existing entries. Hrmmmm…

Update: I’ve found the comment problem - I wasn’t missing all comments - just comments dating from June, when I first updated to the MT3, then went back to MT 2.6. From that point on, the comments_visible field in the mt_comments table was NULL rather than 1. No idea why, but I fixed this with a quick SQL statement, re-exported, and the missing comments since June 4 are now visible in the export. Now I need to do some surgery: remove all entries since then, trim the export file to just the affected entries, and re-import just those. Tomorrow…

Update 2: Comments from June 4 to the present have been restored.

In a not-so-recent piece at Slate, Hart Seely celebrates the accidental poetry of our accidental secretary of defense, the most famous example of which is:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

This week, Studio360 features examples of Rumsfeld’s “poems” set to music (Real Audio link) by artist Phil Kline, surprisingly beautiful. “There’s a little bit of Gertrude Stein in him,” says Kline.

Kline has also set the poems that smoking GI’s often inscribe on the cases of their Zippo lighters to music.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two new customer web sites this week:

circa1973.com: Photographs by Susannah Stromberg (Three | Surfaces | Something Beautiful | Offerings). Fine art photography, intensely rich. Color images, but with the poetry and dramatism most often associated with black & white.

osmosiscommunications.com: Vermont-based strategic public relations and marketing firm. “Osmosis promotes the “permeation” of information and ideas about your company–its goals, mission, promise and value.”

How far out is the far religious right? Jimmy Swaggart is how far out. Video here (Windows Media).

Transcript:

“I get amazed, I can’t look at it about 10 second, at these politicians dancing around this, dancing around this, I’m trying to find a correct name for it, this utter absolute asinine
idiotic stupidity of men marrying men.”

(shouts from crowd)

“I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry.”

(shouts, applause)

“And I’m gonna be blunt and plain, if he ever looks at me like that I’m going to kill him and tell God he died.”

(laughter, applause)

“In case anybody doesn’t know God calls it an abomination. It’s an abomination! It’s an abomination!”

(applause)

“These ridiculous, utterly absurd district attorneys and judges and state congress and ‘well, we don’t know’… they ought to have to marry a pig and live with them forever.”

(laughter)

“I’m not knocking the poor homosexual, I’m not, they need salvation like anyone else… I’m knocking our pitiful pathetic lawmakers.”

“And I thank God that President Bush has stated,”

(applause)

“we need a Constitutional Amendment that states that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

(applause)

“Alright.”

Thanks Ethan.

The American Museum of the Moving Image is hosting an exhibition called Living Room Candidate — dozens of political ads spanning 1952 to the present illustrating how presidential candidates have used the medium of television to convey message through the years, and how those ads have mirrored the TV styles of their times. Most of the early ads seem so naive by today’s standards — silly cartoons of marching elephants, donkeys, and hard-working Americans, or pretty girls singing content-free political ditties. Some are just plain bizarre.

A surprising number feature life-long devotees of one party or another switching party loyalties, like this 1964 Confessions of a Republican (I hear this ad was later criticized for being scripted and played by an actor). Fast forward to 2004 - ads cover 5 subjects in 30 seconds, and end debating who still has shrapnel in their leg from Vietnam.

Anyway, the site is a great record of a half century of TV politics. The clips are like peanuts, hard to stop watching.

Sure, our lawn looks easy to mow — that’s why I bought a manual push-mower last year. But truth be known, the yard is full of hidden dips and divets, soft patches, and not-so-hidden hills that mean I always have to run full-tilt boogie to prevent the mower from bogging down every few feet. Raising the blades a notch means missing too much grass. Today finally got fed up and called baald in a sweat: “Can I borrow your lawn mower, man?” baald has a nuclear-powered Lawn Hawg.

Felt like waking up from a bad dream. Despite protestant work ethic which demands I exert undue effort to derive satisfaction from any given job, I’m never going back. It’s like vacuuming the grass. Clean lines, little hesitation through the rough spots, and shoulders that don’t ache at the end of the day. Got to find a used electric mower.

Last year, automatic transmission, this year, no-sweat mowing. What am I becoming? Old and reasonable?

How well do you retain information from grade school that you rarely use? mneptok recently pointed out statistics revealing that 70% of Americans could not find New Jersey on a map of the United States, which I found astounding. That got Amy and I to talking, and we decided to give ourselves a challenge. Printed out a blank map of the U.S. and gave ourselves an un-timed test to see how many state names we could fill in.

Taking the test was a fun, but jarring experience. After the gimme states are done, you start rummaging back to these distant memories of elementary school, chewing on a pencil, looking for associations between what are essentially arbitrary shapes and their names - no programming logic will help you here - pure memory power.

I expected to get about 40/50 states right, but only got 29. Was able to fill in names for almost all of them, but put a surprising number of them in the wrong slots. Amy blew me away with a sterling 48/50 correct. And as it turned out, I have to count myself as among the 70% of Americans who cannot find New Jersey on a map. Pathetic? Or just the natural result of not being able to retrieve information I haven’t used for years? (Note that I have a terrible head for geography in general — maps tend to overwhelm me, and I get lost in places I’ve lived for years, which probably has something to do with my score).

If you take the test (takes about 15 minutes), post your results here - I’d be curious to see how other people do. No advance study allowed.

From good old Mad Magazine (who among us was not unduly shaped in our formative years through hours of study?), this scanned page that’s been floating around comparing Jesus’ words to Bush’s position on various issues. It is a puzzle to me how a leader so steeped in his faith can stand so firmly against the central tenets of that very same belief system.

Also interesting: Who’s the Flip-Flopper? — an AP story chronicling some of the more dramatic about-faces of Bush’s presidential career — a series of directional and policy shifts that are collectively just as flip-floppery as Kerry’s. Politics, like life, is just that way - the terrain shifts, the available information changes, our response to it morphs to accomodate.

Thanks Steve and Frank

At OJR, a fairly exhaustive piece on the history and status of weblog comment spam, including this zinger from Irish blogger Antoin O Lachtnain, laying down the gauntlet (though I doubt it had any effect):

Relevant comments are very welcome, whether you agree or disagree with what I have to say. However, advertising of goods or services is not permitted on this forum without payment of a fee. The fee per advertisement is 500 Euros, which is payable immediately by bank draft. If you post an ad but do not pay the charge immediately you have corrupted data on this Web site without my permission. As such, you are guilty of criminal damage under the Criminal Damage Act, 1991 and subject to a prison sentence of up to 10 years and a fine of up to 12,700 Euros…Please note that posting on this forum will have no effect whatsoever on the PageRank of any links that you post.

Deep in the catacombs beneath Paris, the vast majority of which are officially closed to the public, police have discovered a previously uncharted 400 sq meter cave with terrace-like seats carved into the sides, a professionally installed electrical system, whisky bar, full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and library of film noir and other movies. True underground cinema, probably operated by some sort of cabal or sect. Police have no idea who the group is, but apparently they’re not alone.

Patrick Alk, a photographer who has published a book on the urban underground exploration movement and claims to be close to the group, told RTL radio the cavern’s discovery was “a shame, but not the end of the world”. There were “a dozen more where that one came from,” he said. “You guys have no idea what’s down there.”

Thanks Dylan.

On a recent episode of The Amazing Race, while in India, Brandon and Nicole took a “Fast Forward” that would have enabled them to leap ahead in the game. All they had to do was travel to a temple and perform an as-yet unknown Hindu ritual. But when they arrived at the temple, they balked, backed out, couldn’t bring themselves to go through with it. Why not? The ritual involved shaving their heads, and they were both models. Damn near cost them the game and a million bucks, their confounded vanity. Shoot, I was especially looking forward to seeing dorky Brandon stripped of his beautiful golden curls.

Later that night, a friend told us about an acquaintance from a family where all the women had had breast cancer. She was the only one who hadn’t. Wanting to make sure she could stick around to raise her child, she opted for a voluntary, pre-emptive, double mastectomy. Had her breasts removed even though she didn’t yet show any signs of cancer, just in case.

We all have our priorities.

I’m in full-tilt work mode when the call comes in. It’s Amy. “Hon (I always brace myself when sentences start this way), I just got a nervous call from [another friend]. They said they had taken an offer for a pile of free mulch, but ended up with umm… way too much. I said we needed some, so they brought over the leftovers in a big truck. It’s in our driveway.” “Nice work!” I responded. We did need a bunch of mulch for some upcoming projects. “Yeah, but it’s, um, a really BIG pile of mulch.” “That’s OK, we’ll use it, don’t worry, gotta run.”

Roll in on the bike as the sun is starting to go orange. Car’s not in the driveway. Because the driveway is full of mulch. As in, FULL of mulch. Shredded redwood fibers, smelled delicous. Miles happy to see daddy. And, being a boy myself, I of course knew he’d be dying to play on the pile.

Guess this means our weekend is booked.

Every industry has its difficult customers, its foibles, and its secret techniques for handling the squinchy corners of everyday business. Defective Yeti’s Matthew Baldwin has compiled a mini-compendium of techniques (supposedly) known only by everyday practictioners: cardboard box flatteners, actors, tech support staff, jugglers, lounge pianists…

Nurse: Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find them out is to pick up their hand, hold it above their face, and let go. If they smack themselves, they’re most likely unconscious; if not, they’re faking.

Just launched a rebuild of John Battelle’s Searchblog. Got some first-hand experience with the holy grail of CSS — 3-column layout with fluid center column (he wanted a right column to drop ads into). Quickly realized that this is clearly one of those areas where a table-based layout would have been infinitely easier, but just can’t bring myself to step back that far in time (or to accept defeat).

With Glish’s sample code, the initial implementation wasn’t difficult - what sucked was butting heads with IE/Win’s horribly broken box model. With the layout working in virtually every modern CSS-compliant browser, checked IE/Win only to find the left and right columns lapping up into the banner space. Trouble is, you can’t float three columns — you have to specify screen placement as absolutes. But do that, and you find out just how far off IE/Win’s reckoning of vertical height is from non-broken CSS implementations. At that point, it becomes a game of seesaw — fix one while breaking the other, or vice versa. Gad, it’s frustrating.

In the end, everything is working fine in IE/Win (IE/Mac was fine all along, of course, since IE/Mac has always had a better CSS implementation than IE/Win) with one small side-effect remaining for the working browsers. Feh. I’ll lick that too… eventually.

John’s post on the redesign.

Slate: Why do you still need a realtor to buy a home? Why hasn’t the web done for real estate transactions what eBay has done for other exchanges? The 3-5% realtors get on both the buying and selling sides adds up to a huge chunk of change, given that the percentage hasn’t changed even as property values have shot up over the years. Agents - both buying and selling - earn tens of thousands of dollars in commission for a home sale, after putting in what generally amounts to a few days worth of work. And it’s not like realtors are magical specialists - it takes only 60 hours of training to get your realtor’s license, while it takes nearly 1,000 hours to become a hair stylist.

After all, escrow companies and home inspectors already do much of the heavy lifting in a real-estate transaction and add more value than most realtors while working for a flat fee.

In an industry with actual, healthy competition, realtor percentages would be a fraction of what they are, and would be commensurate with the amount of effort and skill put into the deal. But every effort to deflate the exaggerated traditional role of the realtor in the digital age is fought tooth and nail by the National Association of Realtors. Now the NAR is up against the DOJ for antitrust.

I’m not saying that realtors are crooks, or that there aren’t a million hidden landmines that realtors help innocent homebuyers to avoid. It’s a complex business and realtors provide an important service. But realty commissions need to enter the realm of fair competition. It’s time for the NAR to be taken down a peg.

A flying saucer bus designed to reduce traffic congestion. An octagonal wheeled water craft invented by a Mexican lawyer. Underground airports. A monorail that looks like a giant Chevy Impala. A public escape pod for plummeting airplanes. 19th century pneumatic subways. Cruise ships with sails. Great collection of images at UC Berkeley library’s online museum of Transportation Futuristics.

Thanks David Huff.

Zell Miller should learn to check snopes — or at least google — before busting a blood vessel in front of America. Turns out that a key chunk of his twisted, toxic speech at the RNC was lifted directly from a widely circulated chain email supposedly demonstrating Kerry’s record on defense spending, but soundly unraveled by snopes. I’m sure Miller’s explosive retort: “Get out of my face!” to Hardball’s Chris Matthews isn’t helping his image much.

Thanks Martini Republic.

A group of programmers, bicyclists, RSS junkies, multimedia gurus and bloggers called screensaversgroup are using mobile projectors on pickup trucks, WiFi, SMS, RSS feeds, and other real-time media to blast political counterweights onto the sides of buildings and sidewalks during the RNC. They’ve even developed their own KeyWorx software to gather, process, and collage incoming public opinion in real time.

The work they’re doing is non-destructive to physical property, but one of the Bikes Against Bush riders was arrested anyway, while giving an interview to a journalist.

Using a wireless Internet enabled bicycle outfitted with a custom-designed printing device, the Bikes Against Bush bicycle can print text messages sent from web users directly onto the streets of Manhattan in water-soluble chalk.

Got a business? Hate your competitors? Hire a mafioso gang of hackers to hammer your enemies’ web sites with distributed denial of service attacks. I’m thinking this would make a great theme for a future Sopranos episode. The younger family members could hang up the “garbage” business and jump feet first into the bloody underground world of packet sniffing. They could call it “Th3 50prawn05.”