The Million Mom March maintains a blacklist of its own, though I guess it's OK since they give the cutesy name of "Time Out Chair".
On the list: Lowe's Hardware, John Ashcroft, Ex-Governor of Michigan John Engler, John Lott, (Senator) Elizabeth Dole, Senator Zell Miller, (Ex-)Rep. Bob Barr, Wayne LaPierre & John Ashcroft, again.

Latest Harry Potter's a real headache

...

In a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Howard Bennett wrote of seeing three patients, ages 8 to 10, who complained of having headaches for two or three days.

'It was determined that each child had spent many hours reading J.K. Rowling's latest book in the Harry Potter series,' Bennett wrote in the letter.

'The presumed diagnosis for each child was a tension headache brought on by the effort required to plow through an 870-page book. The obvious cure for this malady -- that is, taking a break from reading -- was rejected by two of the patients, who preferred (painkillers) instead,' Bennett wrote.

At least the little bastards are reading...

I had a bit of a dyslexic moment this morning that lead me to read these sequential headlines on My Yahoo!:

• Bush: USA isn't ready for total adoption ban
• Abortion groups opening doors to gays, report says

Bush disavows background banner in May speech

On Tuesday, Bush said the banner was put up by the crewmembers of the Abraham Lincoln to say that their mission was accomplished. 'I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff. They weren't that ingenious, by the way,' Bush said.

A few years ago I volunteered to drive in a motorcade when President Bush visited town. I learned through chatting with one of the young staffers that President Bush worked as an advance man for his father while Bush-41 was in office. Because of this, the staffer told me President Bush was very hard on his own advance men, expecting perfection from them, since he had done the job himself earlier in life.

That's why I highlighted the portion above, as I expect someone is in deep doo-doo on this one. Not for suggesting it, but for not realizing that it might turn out to have been a bad thing.

"I find myself wondering how much longer it is going to be before the American left starts wearing ..." Ouch!

A couple of years ago I predicted that Senator McCain would join Senator Lieberman on a cross-party ticket to run for President/VP. I even made this goofy graphic to go with the thought. Looks like I was right, at least in spirit.

Lieberman In Pursuit Of McCain Constituency

"Joe Lieberman brings up John McCain's name so much on the campaign trail it seems the Arizona Republican is the Connecticut Democrat's running mate."

A few months back my goofy fake Matriculas Consular design gets used as a prop on the floor of Congress by Rep. Tom Tancredo.

In my second graphic-art media coverage event, today's Cornell Daily Sun covered my "City of Evil merchandise!

"Ithaca is the City of Evil"

A complete line of merchandise can be found at www.cafepress.com/cityofevil, displaying the words "Ithaca is the City of Evil." This merchandise has been endorsed by www.freerepublic.com. [NOT TRUE - tc]

According to its website, www.freerepublic.com is "an online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web." It is comprised of forums, articles and links of interest to conservatives around the country.

A post by aptly named contributor "Behind Liberal Lines" at www.freerepublic.com/~behindliberallines, criticizes Ithaca as the "City of Evil," citing liberal sentiments.

"Politics in Ithaca runs the gamut from 'liberal' to 'communist,'" the article says, referring to Ithaca's history of endorsing Democratic and Green Party candidates.

The writer criticizes Ithaca's "alternative" schools and the "educated idiots" who attend school in Ithaca, including its many college students.

Links to newspaper articles displaying news from Ithaca grace the site to show said liberal tendencies.

Some conservatives empathize with the author's point, but do not necessarily agree that Ithaca is "the City of Evil." Paul Chernick '04 remarked, "The author of the website does have a point, but while it is hard to be a conservative in Ithaca, I can only imagine how liberals feel in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan or the Deep South."

T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, bumper stickers, mouse pads and even lunch-boxes have been decorated with the "evil" slogan and can be found at the Cafe Shops website.

My pager watch uses FlexTime, a GPS powered, accurate to 1 second time signal, sent over paging frequencies that automatically updates the time on the watch to correct local time.

Beepwear's website even brags that "When local time changes to DST, Daylight Savings Time, the pager watch automatically updates its time. ( When in paging coverage area )"

Well, I'm in the paging area, and my watch is still off by hour now 36+ hours after D.S.T. ended this weekend.

Boo Skytel, boo!

UPDATE: Sometime Wednesday morning, over four days late, my watch finally started showing the correct hour.

Hey Tuba Boy!

Looks like the Firebird actually did pretty well.

A tractor trailer overturned on a late-model Pontiac Firebird Wednesday afternoon. The crash happened at Dover Crossing Road and Fort Campbell Boulevard. Six vehicles were involved in the crash. Eight people were injured in the wreck. Five of them were taken by the Emergency Medical Service to Gateway Medical Center. None of the injuries were life threatening.

[Click picture for full story.]

I like Bruce Sterling's books quite a bit & I enjoyed a talk I saw him give on Book TV once, but I never knew that he was such a whiny bitch.

I read his piece entitled "10 technologies that deserve to die" waiting for the punch line, a "got ya", or at least some nod to the fact that we mere humans can't shift our reality at the drop a hat to suit his perception of how things should be.

Color me disappointed.

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Stupid Headline of the Day:

Testimony may play crucial role at trial

Wow, you don't say? Testimony, important at a trial? Who'd a thunk it?

Digital cameras typically name the picture files they create in a farily predictable fashion, usually a prefix that remains constant followed by an incremented number. For example Kodak camera start with DCP00001.jpg, followed by DCP00002.jpg and so on.

Many people do not bother to rename their picture files when posting them to the web, which leads to this neat little webpage on diddly.com that uses the google image search to find random photos based upon likely default digital camera file names. Think of it as voyeurism light.

I just learned a new word and thought it interesting enough to pass on: "boffin."

[Spotted in this headline Boffins discover true power of water]

Surprise, The New York Times is full of crap yet again. In a hit piece about Wal-Mart supercenters, the Times attempts to sneak in this pretty blatant stretching of the facts:

"Wal-Mart has already helped push more than two dozen national supermarket chains into bankruptcy over the past decade. That list includes names like Grand Union..."

This is a crock. I grew up in and lived among the areas of New York that Grand Unions purported to serve. They were dirty, poorly run, poorly lit, over-priced dinosaurs of stores. They killed themselves through mismanagement, and quite frankly they did so in plenty of areas where there wasn't a Wal-Mart SuperCenter within 100 miles. Price Chopper & Sun Foods killed Grand Union, at least in my home town.

Last week Tuba Boy told me about how flame retardants are building up in Americans and even in breast milk. I joked at the time that maybe flame retardants were maiking Americans fat, inhibiting oxidation in cellular processes. Not a great joke, but someone might get some use out of it.

I spotted this in a car's window as he was leaving Jersey into Delaware. I figure he was leaving for his own safety.

In case you can't read it the sign says "SPRINGSTEEN CAN KISS MY ASS".

(Blogged while at extra-legal speeds in Maryland. Delaware goes by real fast...)

Ahh government, where would be without it? Might we have to face the unthinkable risk of a limousine operator who didn't charge enough for his services.

Daniel Steiner came to the United States from Brazil more than 20 years ago to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams.

After driving a cab for years, he built a five-car limousine business that has him and his employees ferrying executives, prom dates and, notably, patients to clinics. He juggles the flow with the help of the three constantly ringing cellular phones he carries.

Steiner, 47, could have it all taken away during a hearing this morning.

His sin, as he puts it: charging his customers too little.

Regulators with the county's Public Transportation Commission mandate that limousine operators, whether they drive limos or Lincoln Town Cars, like Steiner, must charge a minimum $40 a trip. They have written up Steiner for charging less.

Didn't charge enough...

For many years Bill Gates had a Porsche 959 sitting in a customs warehouse because it wasn't certified for sale in the US. Anyway, turns out someone finally figured out how to work the system so that they could legally import the 959. It was the AutoWeek cover story on September 15th. The tech stuff is pretty neat, in that certifying it for emissions they actually bumped the horsepower from 450 to ~575 and the torque from 380 ft-lbs to 501, but even more interesting was that getting the DOT/EPA to certify the car required the passing of a federal law back in 1998 (attached to a transportation bill) that created a special exemption from crash testing requirements for rare cars when under 500 examples were produced.

Also interesting was this passage, "From 1987 to 1988 Porsche built 226 959s, plus another four from parts in 1992, for a total of 230."

I wonder for whom, and why, Porsche went into the parts bin to crank out four more 959's four years after assembly had ceased

  Repeat 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$99.99.

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.

Last month this was deal of the month @ $119.99!

As Tuba Boy could attest, I love stuff like this. Noah Weiner [really, that's his name, sort of like Carl T. Bogus], jackass leader of Move On, sicked his sycophants on Bob McManus, having them call him hundreds of times over a few day period, each pretty much dumping the same scripted into his voice mail time after time.

McManus' response is beautiful, a column entitled THAT'S (718) 832-6459.

Feel free to exercise your free speech rights.

His Getaway Ferry
The assailant, identified by police as Ernesto DeJesus, 41, raced up a terminal escalator from the blood-soaked scene just outside the glass doors and boarded the ferry, with the boat soon getting underway at a leisurely 17 knots, bound for his home borough of Staten Island.

Attack tiger may have been distracted

Distracted? I wonder how tigers respond to laser pointers?

Found this post on "the gist mill" via Blogger's Next Blog function and liked it so much I thought I would pass it on.

Author Meme Lists
Here's how this works. One person offers a list of ten authors whose work appears on that person's bookshelf. The next person deletes those authors whose books don't appear on their own bookshelf and replaces them with authors whose work does. Repeat, I imagine, ad nauseum.

[Will Hindmarch's List]
H.P. Lovecraft
John LeCarre
William Goldman
Fritz Leiber
Richard K. Morgan
William Gibson
Bill Bryson
A. Alvarez
J. Gregory Keyes
Mike Mignola

Mine:
James W. Hall
William Goldman
George Orwell
Fritz Leiber
Tom Robbins
William Gibson
Carl Hiassen
Spider Robinson
Charles Dickens
Steve Martin (Yes, that Steve Martin)

Please continue in comments, or post a link in comments to your blog where you've continued this.

Mother of Golden Gate Suicide Jumper Sues Bridge Authority

Milligan recently filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of her daughter's estate against the Golden Gate Bridge District and the bridge's board of directors, seeking to require them to put up a barrier. Her suit charges, "Through their acts and omissions Defendants have authorized, encouraged, and condoned government-assisted suicide." Three previous lawsuits against the bridge by the parents of suicides have all been dismissed, and the bridge officials' reply to Milligan's suit lays out their standard defense: "Plaintiffs' injuries, if any, were the result of Plaintiffs' own actions (contributory negligence)." Furthermore, the reply says, "plaintiffs cannot show that Ms. Imrie used the property with due care for the purposes it was designed."

Not to be callous (narf) but who will they be suing next; Mother Nature for creating high cliffs in Yosemete?

I wonder if this plan to fiber optic cable in gas pipelines will run into any of the same easement/restricted right of way problems that is going to cost Sprint and other telecom companies a huge chunk of change to settle.

How the heck did I not know until today that Google works as a calculator. Cool!