Today, it was announced that former President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Today, our current president is continuing his efforts to go to war with Iraq.

Make of this what you will.

Real Life & such got in the way.

Anyway, we start today, a fine Friday in October, just a whisp of fall in the otherwise muggy Houston air, with this fine submission from NoGators Music Correspondent Mikey the Shiv. Check out the rest of the site, too.

NBC is whining about its Emmy losses to cable, in particular vis a vis Sheen and West Wing losing to Chiklis and The Shield, which “nobody in America has ever seen.” NBC Entertainment president Jeffrey Zucker also wants you to know they they’re just as groundbreaking as HBO, darn it. Really.

Good God, that doesn’t even pass the giggle test. I want some of what he’s smoking.

We’re still imprisoning people — legal immigrants — with no trial, no charges, and no right to appeal. This is being done in our name. It’s got to stop.

Or so promised the mysterious email submission from Nogators Weirdness Correspondent E. G. H. I was unprepared for the brilliance within, though the pleasure it brings, like all happiness, was fleeting indeed.

I just hope we take his words to heart in 2004.

Radio interview from Australia. Real Audio and kind of long, but also starkly more lucid than his public persona would lead you to expect.

This first one I found via this wonderful Who Would Buy That? site, which then inspired me to post this other one.

What’s your pirate name?

The best moving sale ever, mang.

Really. It’s a tribute, quite reverent and everything. Really. I mean it.

Warren Zevon has announced [EOnline.com coverage; the link may rot] that he has terminal lung cancer.

The above is an actual quote.

The WSJ is reporting another email worm making the rounds, this one with a 9/11 theme and named “Chet.”:

‘Chet’ Computer Worm Carries Sept. 11 Theme A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP Computer antivirus experts said Wednesday that a Sept. 11th-themed computer worm has emerged which spreads via Microsoft Corp.’s e-mail programs. Network Associates Inc., the big U.S. antivirus company, rates the “Chet” worm a low-profile threat. The worm was discovered Tuesday and was apparently written in Russia. The worm resides in an e-mail attachment file called “11september.exe,” which when opened, attempts to send itself to each e-mail address listed in the Windows address book. The e-mail has “All people!!” in the subject line and appears to come from a sender at “mail@world.com.” The e-mail contains the message: “Dear ladies and gentlemen! The given letter does not contain viruses, and is not Spam.” It describes a conspiracy theory about the terror strikes on Washington, D.C., and New York, and urges readers to open the photos and documents attached. Japanese software company Trend Micro Inc. and Finnish computer-security company F-Secure Corp. issued warnings Wednesday about Chet. F-Secure said the worm isn’t a big threat to computer systems since it “contains serious bugs.” Mikko Hypponen, manager of antivirus research at F-Secure, said in a press release: “This seems to be a poor attempt from a wannabe virus writer to exploit the commemoration of September 11,” “However, as the worm seems to crash regularly, it won’t go far.” The most successful viruses use e-mail to propagate, often sending out copies of themselves to addresses saved in users’ Microsoft Outlook programs. Some notable recent virus outbreaks include Klez, Code Red and Nimda. Updated September 11, 2002 12:33 p.m. EDT

Rest assured if I wrote a virus, I wouldn’t rely on Outlook, okay?

Nogators Senior Swimming Analyst Mikey the Shiv points out this site documenting an effort to swim the Mississippi. I say he’s a pansy; a real man would do it against the current.

Finally, a plan for the WTC site we can all support.

Yeah, Buzz is one bad motherf…

Shut yo mouth!

“I’m just talkin’ about Buzz.”

Dogs and cats!

The inevitable barrage of cheap slag pieces complaining about said tour, that’s what. This time it’s the Rolling Stones, of course. Yes, they’re pushing sixty. Yes, they’re touring again. Yes, they’ll make millions doing it. And yes, again, somehow this just pisses some people off.

Case in point: I just read this piece from the New York Times. With essentially no exceptions, it is more or less exactly the same piece that’s run somewhere every time the Stones have toured since about 1975. Columns like this are as tired and boring as they say the Stones are, if not moreso. It’s a knee-jerk response calculated to resonate with the inevitable hipper-than-thou types who find the Stones repugnant because they’re not the cutting edge of cool anymore. I read the same bit in 1989, and again in 1994 — and went on to enjoy the Stones tours both years, as did thousands of other people.

The only shocking thing about this particular piece is the author. Neal Pollack is a regular contributor to Dave Eggers’ McSweeneys.Net online literary magazine, and typically his pieces are interesting and well-considered. This is a flaccid retread of something a hundred men and women have written before, and it takes us nowhere new. So he’s got his panties in a wad that Jagger, et. al., will pocket millions by playing this tour, and he feels it Important to insist that they “have nothing to do with Rock and Roll.” Whatever, man. I hope the NYT check was big. What are you now, the Comic Book Guy? |*|

Hop in and we’ll cruise over to Mos Eisley.

My friend Stephanie has some things to say about her Kaldi Cafe and the Pomplemoose Lodge & Social Club, and she wants you to know if’n you live in Houston.

Somebody’s figured out an amusing use for televangelists, brothers and sisters, and it makes my soul sing. Can I get an amen?

Especially in light of this, which up to now I was sure was a sign of the Apocalypse.

UPDATE: The original link went away pretty quickly, but this one seems more solid. In brief, Snoop Dogg has kicked gin, juice, and pot. Which is sorta like Barry White becoming celibate, but whatever.

“Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!“

I have a well-documented thing for certain rear-engine air-cooled German cars, so it’s no surprise that I find this to be an abomination. Well, to be honest, this is much, much worse. You may shriek in horror now.

Leonard Nimoy sings about hobbits. No, really.

The folks at Soul Train are assholes.

Actually, there’s more to it than that. A fifteen-year-old California high school student took issue with their choice for their annual lady-of-soul award, viewing Ashanti as a less worthy candidate than his favorite contender, India.Arie. So, like any teen with time on his hands, he started a petition at PetitionOnline.com and circulated it to his friends, figuring at most he’d get 100 or so signatures.

Well, it got more interesting than that. He got more than ten thousand. Soul Train was unaccountably threatened by this act, and their webmaster sent the kid an abusive email for daring to question their judgement. Furthermore, they posted said mail on their site (you’ll have to go to the kid’s site to see screenshots of it), though eventually they removed it in favor of the two diatribes currently on their front page — which include references to “white-owned BET,” apparently their windmill du jour, as well as commentary about how anyone has time to organize petitions in a post-9/11 world (presumably, though, finding time to honor artists in the first place is Just Fine for any Red-Blooded, Soul-Train-Loyal American). Additionally, they cast aspersions on this kid based on his “foreign-sounding” name, and seem to view his opinions as meritless since he’s not black. What the Fuck?

Wow. Way to go, Soul Train! For these actions — i.e., having a very silly and very public fit because a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD disagreed with you — we present you with the first annual NoGators Award for Shockingly Stupid Corporate Behavior! Don Cornelius, come (get?) on down!

Gone crazy? Change your name and create your own community, population 1.

So should you. Especially Rick.

Ladies and gentlemen (and Tom), it is the distinct pleasure of NoGators Internet Entertainment to present the Best Picture Ever.

The courts have ruled that the detainees in Cuba have no rights, at least in terms of any recourse through the US courts for being detained indefinitely without charges or access to counsel or even the formal POW label. This is freakish and bizarre. Bush, et. al., would be screaming bloody murder if some other country held our citizens this way, but it’s suddenly just fine if we do it. So much for rule of law.

Go here to read the NYT editorial that begins:

The Justice Department all but told a federal judge this week to take his legitimate concerns about civil liberties and stuff them in the garbage pail. The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. It took this misguided position to a ludicrous extreme on Tuesday, insisting that the federal courts could not review its determinations. This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism. The courts must firmly reject the White House’s assertion of unchecked powers.

It appears that whole “checks and balances” thing we learned about back in junior high may not apply after all, at least if the Bush Justice Department has its way.

Salon reported today that the Operation TIPS hotline — you know, so you can report suspicious activity by your shifty neighbors after they complain about your stereo? — is actually ringing at America’s Most Wanted. The ACLU has a great press release as well.

Think carefully about this. Fox is involved in domestic, citizen-based spying? I mean, the whole citizen-spying thing was creepy enough, but just exactly what sort of message are we sending by having ratings-whore John Walsh’s televised detective magazine involved?

Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

In response to the new South African HIV+ muppet, our friends at Modern Humorist have prepared a list of more potential new Sesame Street residents.

Note: Jokes about the third muppet on the list are neither funny nor welcome. Heh.

Don’t Link To Us! is a compendium of brain-dead sites who seem to think we need their permission to link to their sites. Just to be clear, linking happens by including the address of the site you’d like to link to in an HTML link tag, like this:

|*|< a href="http://www.nogators.com/" >NoGators< /a >|*|

which gets rendered on the page like this: NoGators

Links are the essense of the web; free linking is how it got to be the place it is. Promulgating the notion that we need permission to commit this basic act is willfully stupid; these firms deserve our ridicule.

The Sun is reporting that LAX security confiscated the two-inch plastic gun from the G.I. Joe doll a woman was taking back to England for her grandson. Gosh, I feel safe.

Tiny dogs in kimonos. No, really.

It’s good to know that in the fast-paced, herky-jerky world of the Internet, some things stay the same. Ladies and gentlemen, I once again call your attention to a little gem called For Sale By Mental Patient. Enjoy.

Judicial Watch’s process server was threatened with arrest by the Secret Service for attempting to serve Cheney with papers related to its lawsuit over Halliburton’s accounting practices. This is, of course, illegal. And yes, they’ve served at the White House before, but I guess it was different when a Democrat lives there.

What BadAss are YOU?

Senior NoGators World Political Correspondent Ear O’Corn provides today’s story about a guy out of work, unemployed, and living with his mother.

We keep hearing about the Harken deal and what may or may not have been insider trading. Nothing will come of it, of course, and perhaps rightly so. But Christopher Caldwell in the New York Press has something to say about the pattern of opportunities Shrub enjoyed, and how that is potentially much more troubling than his fortunately-timed stock sale:

What kills the President is that every time Harken comes up, Democrats get to retell the story of how he made his money. And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having “earned” a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest dayâs work in his life.

(Link)

I’ve just discovered One Thousand Blank White Cards, an improvisational card game. Check it out here and here and especially here. I have this feeling this is going to happen at my house sometime soon.

I’m not sure I can follow all of this guy’s ideas, but some bits are weirdly compelling.

So I rebuilt most of the site, including the Heathen templates, mostly to divest myself (finally) of some awful cut-and-paste code I started using before I had a clue about stylesheets. The HTML under all this should actually make sense now. Feedback encouraged.

No, really.

Which is to say not jokes about comic geeks, but jokes for comic geeks.

This whole site is great, but it’s this one that really kills me.

This whole site is great, but it’s this one that really kills me.

First, this: I had a great weekend. My brother got married. I was best man. It was a fantastic, wonderful, incredible experience, and I couldn’t possibly be happier about it. My new sister-in-law just rocks, and she makes my brother happier than I’ve ever seen him. It’s great.

BUT: Last night, at their fabulous enormous beautiful reception at the Country Club of Jackson, Mississippi, their band did not show up. No calls. No messages. Nada.

So, if you happen to be in the market for a Motown/R&B act in the Mississippi/Alabama area, there are a number of fine options. However, you should avoid at all costs a group called 24-7, whom Aubrey’s father reserved through Frasco Entertainment in Jackson.

Did I mention that my little brother and most of his friends are attorneys?

Anyway, we all still had a good time, but good GOD, to not even SHOW UP to a wedding gig. . . wow.

Thai officials have their collective knickers in a twist over an advertisement for a bar in Philadelphia.