Deal of the month! In today's "Friday Sale," Amazon has a refurbished Almond Kitchen Aid 300-Watt, 4.5 Quart Mixer for just $119.99. (Also available at this price in white.)

I've bought four or five of these over the years as wedding presents for people, though I've never been able to get one for less than $160. A hundred and twenty bucks is a great deal on this mixer.

Santa Claus Found Dead.

First comes your legal education, then continuing legal education, then, I suppose, if the first two don't take, remedial legal education.

The d'uh of the day goes out to NY Times reporter Rachel L. Swans who felt the need to include this tripe in her story about the now famous Mexican 'Matriculas Consular', aka Illegal Alien ID card.

Illegal immigrants who carry the matr?cula card still risk deportation and are still barred from working by federal law. They cannot use the card to register to vote, change their immigration status or to obtain Social Security numbers or work permits.

Geez, imagine that, a piece of plastic and paper printed by the Mexican government can't be used to change U.S. immigration status, nor can it be used to register to vote in the U.S.

Next ol' Rachel will tell us that I can't use Welsh passport to register for the draft, nor will I be able to get Social Security Disability on the basis of my YMCA membership card.

UPDATE: Further, I am told, a Bob's Stores discount card will not qualify me for medicare.

Here's a nice goofy quote from American Idol winner Clay Aiken taken from a CNN story about the American Idol 2 summer tour.

"The other day I got a turkey baster from a lady in Charlotte," Aiken says. "I still don't know why I got the turkey baster."

For God's sake, Clay, it's the second result on Google.

Strange how "Cradle to Grave" can accelerate the arrival of the latter.

In France, morgues and funeral homes overflowed with bodies and painful questions are being asked about why so many elderly people were left alone.

"People have lost their sense of responsibility," said Nadia Finkielman, lending support to a grieving friend at a Paris morgue. "They think the government is going to resolve every problem in their life."

Some great analysis and commentary about last weeks blackout in the most recent edition of comp.risks.

By Patrick Lincoln (excerpt)

One lesson that can be drawn from incidents like the recent massive power outage is that decreasing margins in all our infrastructures place critical societal functions at greater and greater risk of significant disruptions from rare accidental and malicious acts. Redefining acceptable levels of risks and protections as the world changes is hard work, but need to be done.

Cost pressures and tight engineering under benign assumptions lead to thin margins. Optimized engineering leads to most events being of small consequence (we've engineered systems to tolerate them), but some rare events can cause massive disruption. It would be 'bad engineering' to overdesign a system to tolerate very rare events, if that tolerance costs more than the failures it would prevent (in expected value to customer terms). Fragility to extremely rare events can be seen as good business. It would be surprising if there weren't rare disruptions (like massive power outages) in highly optimized infrastructures.

By Edward Reid (Excerpt)

The very fact that it happened so fast is one reason that expert speculation on the cause has been slow to come. (Political speculation, of course, occurred almost as fast as the outage.) Most large outages, including the ones in the northeast US in 1965 and 1977, propagated over a period of many minutes. They involved overloads which did not immediately trip protection. The symptoms were such that the (human) system operators were expected to see them and react, and the failure of the operators to shed load quickly was a major factor in the extent of the outages.

By contrast, this outage spread so fast that only automatic controls had any chance of stopping it once it began. (Whether recognizably dangerous conditions existed before the first failure remains to be seen. Analysis of contingencies is a major part of online control systems, but choosing the proper actions to minimize risk is an extremely complex problem.) In those outages decades ago, the system was gradually pulled over the brink. In this outage, it was tossed over the edge like a finger flicking a match stick. The Niagara area saw a flow change of 3GW, the output of three nukes, in under a second.

For indexing only - What's that you say? You bought an el-cheapo USB Data/Charging cable from eforcity.com to use your Motorola T720 as a modem with your PC, but now you can't find any drivers online to make it work.

I faced the same problem, but then I finally found a place to download the T720 USB data cable drivers here.

I hope this link helps some people avoid duplicating the time I spent finding this driver. NOTE: I've only used it with Win2K, but I think it works with 98SE and XP also.

UPDATE: Here's a driver if you have the Radio Shack USB cable for the T720.

What does official mean?

BOSTON -- Democratic convention officials are trying to shutdown a rogue Web site that is posting fake sponsors, soliciting ads and luring would-be volunteers in cyberspace.

The site -- www.2004dnc.com -- claims to be the Official Guide for the Democratic National Convention 2004 in Boston. However both the Democratic National Committee and the Boston 2004 host committee said there is nothing official about the Web site.

It'll be fun to see how this one plays out.

[I first heard about this story on WFCR this morning, but they don't have any story up on the web yet.]

UPDATE: A little bit of digging at the above site failed to show its current usage of the term official. It even gives a link to the DNC on its links page, though the page is rather spuriously titled "sponsors_democrats2004.htm".

The Google Cache does reveal past usage of "Official Guide for the Democratic National Convention 2004, Boston, Massachusetts USA*", with the * leading to this footnote "*This website is in no way endorsed by or affiliated with the Democratic party, Democratic National Convention or it's Committees."

I saved a screenshot of how it looks in the cache here.

LAST UPDATE: The description meta-tag still says "Democratic National Convention 2004 Official Website Boston, Massachusetts" AND the alt-text for the banner image reads "Official Convention Guide for Boston 2004 Massachusetts USA".

Purchase your very own piece of Mars, on ebay of course.

A Lincoln company is auctioning off part of the famous Mars meteorite Zagami, which fell to Earth Oct. 3, 1962, in central Nigeria.

Bids for the fragment, which weighs about 6.6 ounces and is about the size of a soda can, begin at $450,000 when the online auction starts Sept. 5 on the Internet site eBay.

As reported in The Austin (TX) Statesman. Also covered here and here.

The auction doesn't start until September 5th, but when it does I'll try to remember to post a link.

Do as I say, not as I do.

A environmental activist who has led high-profile opposition to commercial logging has admitted violating state timber harvest rules by cutting down trees to make way for a new home, a newspaper reported.

In settling a dispute with the state Department of Forestry, Vince Taylor agreed that he violated the regulations last year when he felled trees on property he owns near the town of Mendocino on the northern California coast, according to a report in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

The harvesting created potential harm to the habitat of the red tree vole and the coast lily, which are considered species of "special concern," according to the state.

The central air conditioner of a house I shared in suburban-DC Maryland was equipped with a device that allowed Pepco to selectively shut down the AC for up to six hours a day, giving it the ability to shed load as necessary to maintain the integrity of the grid.

On the other side of the equation it turns out there programs instituted to remotely activate emergency generators before they are needed. Cool! [I learned of this when NECN did a spot on EnerNOC.]

The fact that this memo is even required explains so much about the shoddy quality of Reuters' work product.

It has come to our notice that some client facing staff are meeting customers with the smell of alcohol on their breath. Whilst having a quick pint or a glass of wine at lunchtimes may not affect your performance the accompanying smell of alcohol could affect your apparent professionalism. With this in mind the consumption of alcohol prior to a client visit is not the impression we want to portray to our customers.

I watched a lot of news coverage of the blackout tonight, and I listened to a lot of radio coverage while driving 7 gallons of gas to save a blackout stranded [relationship deleted due to blog rules], and I am amazed at one fact that never came up on any of the coverage -- That the biggest story of the day before the blackout exists largely due to the blackouts that hit the west coast last year. Maybe some big media outlets did point out that Grayout Davis' failure to keep the lights on in California contributed quite a bit of support to the recall effort, but I never heard this come up.

I think I've got a new slogan for ABCPMSNBCBS -- Sound Bites not Synthesis.

Well, I've got power in Simsbury, CT -- But just one town over is out. Lucky me!

I'm so proud! Three of my "Famous judicial opinions presented as Haiku" landed on this weeks Top Five Law List.

Case -- Marbury v. Madison:

Judicial Review?
Unconstitutional Laws?
Constitution Wins.

Case -- The Slaughter-house Cases:

Right to ply a trade?
No federal right exists.
Freedom's abattoir.

Case -- US v. Miller:

My sawed off shotgun,
Is it a militia gun?
Who knows, Miller fled.

T-Shirts for Democrats. Heh.

Bicyclist Fleeing Cops Dies After Fall

I think we need a law that requires drug dealers on bikes to wear helmets.

"Manufacturer Unknown"?

Heck, I got one of these "invisible to magnetometers" lettuce knives with my Zyliss Salad Spinner.

Man, you gotta watch out for those Swiss.

UPDATE: The spinner mentioned above no longer comes with the plastic knife, but this one does.

With all the proof readers, editors and fact checkers the official press has in the U.S., why did I have to go to a website from New Zealand to find the patent number covering the claims that ebay lost an infringement suit on yesterday. Shouldn't it be a basic fact reported in any case covering a patent to actually provide the patent at issue. What next, book reviews that don't bother to disclose their title? How about a celebrity profile that refuses to name the covered party?

For the record, the patent can be viewed here.

This program sounds great. Why should it be discontinued? Is it the hawk's fault that New Yorkers buy dogs that look like rats?

Hawk Attacks Chihuahua In Bryant Park

If any more coverage of "metrosexuals" is crammed down my throat there's a good chance I'll commit the first anti-metrosexual hate crime.