From a USA Today story about President Bush's Thanksgiving day trip comes this unlikely nugget:

Tom McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former fighter pilot, said that the president took some risks but that the trip was neither foolhardy nor ill-advised.

'The Air Force is equipped to handle the threats,' he said.

He said Air Force One has some of the most sophisticated defense systems ever devised. The systems include flares that can draw heat-seeking missiles away from the jet's engines and on-board lasers that can shoot down incoming missiles.

Shoot down?

I figure he said confuse or disable, and the reporter blew the quote, but who knows. Maybe they really do have lasers on board that can down missiles.

But I doubt it.

Click Image for 1024 x 768 version

An explanation of the previous post.

The wife and I are driving down to DC for Thanksgiving. I took the first four hours of a 5 hour trip, and as payoff I get to surf via a Verizon T720 CDMA phone while my wife finishes the drive.

Anyway, imagine my surprise as the phone not only didn't drop a Quick2Net session while in the tunnel, it actively sent and received data while in the deepest bowels of the tunnel.

I've had the same connection for over 20 minutes. Sure it's slow at 14.4, but with images turned off you still get a pretty good surfing experience. The latency is very low, which helps compensate for the narrow bandwidth.

And, on my plan, with free nights and weekends I can surf all I want this time of night for no charge.

This post blogged from INSIDE THE BALTIMORE HARBOR TUNNEL, at around 55 mph.

The web truly is everywhere, at least in the NE US.

Anyone want to take bets on whether the NRA foundation or The Second Amendment Foundation will qualify under Mission Fish's community standards?

3.4 We expect all Participating Nonprofits to meet MissionFish's high ethical standards, including, without limitation, our policies regarding the kinds of NPOs that are appropriate for participation in the MissionFish community. For example, your organization is not authorized to register to become a Participating Nonprofit if you sponsor or promote hatred, violence or illegal activities. MissionFish reserves the right to deny or revoke participation as a Participating Nonprofit to any NPO that fails, in MissionFish's sole opinion, to meet these standards.

Because if they do I have a few auctions for charity I'd like to run on ebay...

 

Is John Kerry using Google AdWords?

Well, someone is, on his behalf, and strange enough one of their keywords is "Dean2004"!

IntelMemo.com

On November 5, 2003, Americans were given an unprecedented look inside the Democrats' war, when Fox News published an astoundingly revealing memorandum from within the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, describing how Democrats on the Committee intend to use their positions, influence, and access to information - not to help win the war on terror, or to protect American citizens - but to undermine the Bush Administration. The memo describes their agreement to launch an "independent investigation" as a means to that end, timed to coincide with the 2004 presidential campaign.

Thar' be funny office humor here, matey's.

ScrappleFace: DNC Leader Sorry for Fundraising Story Gaffe.

I hate cheery goddamn government-paid-for advertisements designed to make you feel good about the latest way they are going to muck around with your life. Last year I wrote about the oh so fucking cute use of "Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide" to advertise New Jersey's tax amnesty program. Though they don't have such a cute theme song, the CT DMV has started running ads designed to make residents feel like the state is helping them out by providing a place to get their cars emissions checked.

We, at Connecticut's new, statewide network of emissions test stations are ready, willing and more than able to test your car. Thousands have already been tested. Now it's your turn – if you received a notice for the test. To find the nearest test station, log onto ctemissions.com.

Wow, really? I can hardly wait to go have you fuckers stick a pipe up my car's ass to suck money out of my wallet. I really feel like my late model well maintained vehicle is the problem here. I really was feeling lost for all that time CT went without a testing program because the last contractor was fatally corrupt and I'm sure this new one, despite its problems in neighboring Massachusetts, will be a shining beacon of government contractor efficiency. Boy, I'm getting excited about helping out my neighbors by submitting to a test, even though I'm not the problem.

<end sarcasm>

This is all simply about revenue, CT trying to find a new way to make a buck. How do I know this? Easy, CT has an exemption in the new testing program for new vehicles. For the first four years you do not need to get cars emission tested, BUT you still have to pay for the emissions test. Wonderful, I know my wife's new car is clean, CT knows it is clean, CT is willing to let me not have it tested, but they still get their money.

Now that's what I call effective government!

Not much blogging lately from me because I've been busy beta-testing my new Target Sucks Bulletin board.

Ahh, the "Needed Killing" defense, long form:

Mr. DeGuerin, who also teaches at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, said that sometimes he refers in class to an old Texas saying about why horse thieves get hung and some killers get off. 'No horse ever needed stealing,' Mr. DeGuerin explained. 'But there are people who need killing.'

Useful info you might have missed:

The IRS recently decided that you can submit some over the counter medicines for reimbursement from your Medical Flexible Spending accounts.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rr-03-102.pdf

[Paraphrased] Amounts expended to purchase antacid, allergy medicine, pain reliever, and cold medicine without a physician's prescription is an expenditure for medical care, and can be reimbursed under medical flexible spending accounts.

However, dietary supplements (e.g., vitamins) are merely beneficial to general good health, therefore, the cost of the dietary supplements is not a reimbursable expense for medical flexible spending accounts.

A few months back I posted a story about LASIK and laser eye correction that pops up every now and again in a google search when someone is looking for Lasik information and providers in Ithaca.

Anyway, via Obscure Store comes an article in yesterday's SF Chronicle on the failure and risks of LASIK, and how a newer more anvanced LASIK might be able to fix some damage caused by prior blown LASIK procedures.

Even with the arrival of adaptive-optics technology to the latest generation of laser vision correction, count me out.

I recently finished In The Wrong Hands, which lead me to leave the following review for it on Amazon.

Never in my four decades of reading have I happened across a book rife with so many typos, malapropisms and broken grammar.

The story itself is interesting and in some ways amazingly timely despite being written in 1994. Mr. Pierson clearly had a pretty good grasp on coming technologies. The editing, or failure thereof, destroys what could have been a fair-to-middling near-future science fiction read.

"In The Wrong Hands," a title equally applicable to when Mr. Pierson wrote it, the time the manuscript for this book spent in its editor's hands and the time it (hopefull won't) spend in your hands.

Sometimes the 24-hour news cycle leads to the creation of some pretty strange new words and phrases. Whether driven by sheer laziness or the simple desire to cram more thoughts into a finite number of syllables, modern news reporting seems to be working double plus hard inventing new ways of abusing language.

When I first heard the term "truck painter" this morning on Imus, during a report on the Green River Killer, at least three thoughts ran through my head.

1. Charles meant to say "house painter"; or,
2. The killer was some sort of artist who painted the sides of trucks; or,
3. This guy had a job at a truck factory painting trucks.

I feared the emergence of another "sniffer dog". "Sniffer dog" being a rather poor substitute for "bomb sniffing dog" or "drug sniffing dog". I blame Paula Zahn for the term "sniffer dog", having heard it on her old Fox News show long before other talking heads started stinking up our language with it.

Turns out the killer used to be employed as a painter in a factory that makes Kenworth trucks. In 24 hour news-speak shorthand (which I suppose I should just call newspeak for short) this becomes "truck painter".

God bless the British, the Guardian describing him as "a longtime painter at Kenworth Truck Co.." The Scotsman sees it way to changing truck to lorry for a bit of local flavor, but uses this substitution to create the even more obtuse "lorry painter".

If one is a "a commercial truck painter" does one paint advertisments on the sides of trucks, or paint only trucks used in commerce? Would such a person paint non-commercial trucks?

CNN International thinks the phrase "truck-painter" needs to be hyphenated.

MSNBC avoids the whole issue by describing the killer as "a onetime house painter." Since no one else mentions this past profession, I think that the MSNBC writer made mistake #1(see above).

The Old Gray Lady correctly points out that he no longer paints trucks (at least professionally) when they refer to him as "a former truck painter" Or, I suppose, that he only paints items that used to be trucks. Maybe he still paints trucks, but only on his own time.

Does "a local truck painter" only paint local trucks? Locally produced trucks, or just locally owned and used trucks?

Economy of language leaves me in depression.

Can unit selection in reporting be a form of bias?

I don't care much for the antics surrounding Roy's Rock down in Alabama, but I have noticed that reporters seem to relish reporting the supposedly behemoth size of the monument.

Which leads me to ask: Would a 4 foot tall monument seem as imposing as a 5000 pound monument? Would a cubic yard and a half monument seem so overpowering as a two and a half ton monument? If not, then are reporters guilty of trying to puff-up the perceived size of this controversial display? Would NPR's Nina Totenberg be so incensed by the monument if it were covered with elephant dung?

Anyway, accepting that weight/mass is the way to measure this thing, just how big it is depends upon whom you listen to. Some say 2.6 ton, 2½ ton is popular, some round it to two ton, others to two-and-a-half ton. CNN repeats the 2.6 ton description, but throws in the editorial "edifice". Buzzle.com gives us a metric mass of 2,376kg (2.3 ton), I think they are using metric tons. (2376 kg = 5227.2 pounds.)

Some reporters seem to get sucked into the sensationalism, but they don't bother being accurate on their weights and measures. Various reports suggest that the monument weighs in as a multi-ton monument, 3 tons (To be fair, ScrappleFace is satirical by design), a missing-the-mark 1.5-ton stone monument, way off the mark at 5 ton monument, and the similar but more strenuously inaccurate massive five-ton monument.

Plenty of folks like to fall back to pounds to get the number a bit higher, but they can't seem to agree whether it is 5,000 pounds, the rather precise 5,280 Pounds of Godliness, a more casual "over 5,000 pounds" or "more than 5,000 pounds", rounding up to 5,300-pound, the rather unlikely 5,100 pounds and even a guess at "about 5,400 pounds."

"The State" seems to have gotten into the game a bit too aggressively, suggesting that the monument weighs nearly 5,300-tons.

5,300 tons? I wonder if the whole court house weighs that much?

Do I have point to all this? I'm not sure. Maybe someone can take this rather raw post and polish it into some funny observation about how the media just loves to provide seemingly precise details, yet there is no way they could all be right...

Know enough to be dangerous.

Once you know just a bit about a subject, well more than enough to be dangerous, you often learn that reporters must be the most dangerous folks in the world.

Sacagawea dollar: In 1999, Treasury announced it would take another stab at a dollar coin. This time, it honored the Shoshone woman with the difficult name, who helped guide Lewis and Clark across the West. To distinguish it from other coins, the piece has a brass-colored coating – which rubs off with even minimal handling.
-- Gordon T. Anderson, CNN money reporter

[I added the red coloring. - TC]

This flat out isn't true. The outer layer doesn't "rub-off", even with extensive handling. The outer layer isn't some thin plating, it is a thick layer of manganese-brass that forms a dark patina as it is handled.

If CNN can't get the basic facts about the construction of a highly media-covered common object correct, why the hell should I trust them to give me factually correct news regarding complex financial transactions?

The Man, keeping a brother down.

"Politicizing holidays is a defining hallmark of totalitarianism."
(Quote by freeper NativeNewYorker.)

Dezelan's mother, Leigh, sat her children down and explained to them about child labor practices in other parts of the world that produce cocoa.

She gave them a choice: The brothers could keep the candy or give it to the Ithaca Fair Trade Coalition, which has sponsored a protest of Mars Inc. and other chocolate manufacturers during the Halloween season.

Dezelan decided to give it up.

Comedian on ebay:

"Star Note" Dollar w/low serial number that is a zip code in Lubbock, TX.