We expect Mr Coyote to become slightly less strident in the near future, because we have it on good authority that he’s (a) about half drunk because (b) he got a pretty sweet job offer today. So there’s that.

Ivan is fucking enormous, and is headed for my homeland.

Hugh Hefner and Stan Lee are teaming up on a project called Superbunnies. I Am Not Making This Up.

This is what may happen if you (a) leave your car outside at night and, presumably, (b) live on the walking route home from the sort of place Faulkner once called “foot-stomping, fiddle-impregnated destinations”.

So we’re fine, and the wedding is on, and will take place at the original location. On the other hand, Charlotte Country — south of Sarasota — is a disaster area, and lacks basic things like operational hospitals; additionally, hundreds of thousands of folks evacuated the lower areas of Sarasota and Tampa only to find themselves directly in the path of the storm, albeit a reduced, inland version.

But as for us and ours, we’re fine.

It’s now raining. Poorly dressed local weathermen breathlessly suggest the possibility that Charley may make the jump to storm manhood and claim Category 5 before landfall. Fortunately, it appears to have turned inland a bit to the south, thereby saving, among other things, Tampa Bay.

In other news, we’ve watched bad USA television, half of the Terminator, and something that involved Bob Newhart doing charades on stage with a monkey. Beer and rum supplies are holding up well, and we’ve discovered the couch can actually fold out into a bed.

So, all in all, things are looking up.

So, right now, it’s clear that 49 of the 50 states in our fair country are completely legitimate places to be, to drink, to watch people get married, etc.

We, of course, are in Florida. In Sarasota, actually. Theoretically, there’s a big wedding tomorrow, but Charley may have other plans. We’re waiting for the storm in a borrowed condo; we’ve got food, ice, towels, wireless Internet access, plus important shit like rum and beer. And, as I said, the plan is for there to be a wedding tomorrow, but the original location is now closed in will likely remain so given its location on the bay.

My friend Mike went to take a contract job in DC today. The flight was interesting.

Today, August 5, is Chief NoGators/Heathen Legal Correspondent Triple-F’s birthday. We can’t tell you how old he is, but we CAN say it rhymes with “schwenty-nine”. (File foto)

Happy birthday, buddy. Have fun in Prague.

No, really:

So, I was working on putting out my own CD and I had decided that it would be called Miscellaneous Heathen based on a picture my wife took of some religious wacko’s protest sign. [Ed: he means this guy, captured in this foto by Tom Tomorrow.] I decided that it might be a good idea to register MiscellaneousHeathen.com or MiscHeathen.com, so I looked them up and found to my dismay that someone had beat me to it. I hated you for having the temerity to think of it way before me. But then I checked out your website and all that hate floated away… and I could hear only birds singing… and see nothing but hearts and teddy bears and, of course, unicorns flying over brightly lit rainbows. In other words, I love your site or blog or whatever you call it. Because of you I have now seen the Shining in 30 Seconds (and performed by Bunnies). And I have found great sources of ACTUAL NEWS. Unbelievable. O.K. — lovefest over. Don’t worry, I won’t send Catherine Zeta Jones threatening letters because of you or anything. Sincerely,
John Hoskinson
www.JohnHoskinson.com

Granted, it’s only fanmail because he wanted the domain at first, but he does give us much grist for the slogan mill, like “Heathen: Unicorns flying over brightly lit rainbows” and such.

It was with some trepidation that we checked out Mr. Hoskinson’s audio samples, but we’re awful glad we did. We like the sound of his record, and we particularly enjoy the name he’s given it. All Hail the Heathen Brotherhood!

This is not a happy story, but it is a good story, and given the top entry on her weblog, it’s safe to say it’s not fiction.

Somebody out there with my email address in their Outlook address book has some variant of W32.Bagle.* (or something like it) on their machine. I know this because longtime Heathen Ms. “Boom Boom” Brown phoned a couple hours to ago to let me know that I might have this buggar myself, a wholly reasonable suspicion on her part.

Of course, that cannot be the case for a variety of reasons. First, I don’t use Outlook. Second, I don’t even run Windows [1]. These two facts make me almost completely immune from the current crop of virii; few bother to write worms and such for non-Microsoft platforms, and even if they did it would be very, very hard to create the sort of chaos things like Bagle, Blaster, et. al. leave in their wake because of the vastly superior security model at work on Unix-based operating systems (i.e., the other two real choices, Macs and Linux). Frankly, you’re dramatically safer even on Windows if you just stop using Outlook, which is the preferred environment for most of these malware mailings.

Why, then, did she think I was infected? Simple; she got mail that looked like it was from me. Well, here’s where I tell a big secret us Internet people know, but most other folks don’t: just because a mail SAYS it’s from bob@catfishdiving.com doesn’t mean it actually IS from bob@catfishdiving.com. It is trivially easy to send a mail that appears to be from anyone you like, even from addresses that don’t actually exist. [2]

So, what happened? Someone — probably someone reading this, even — got Bagle in their Outlook, and it did its dirty work by sending mail on the sly out to folks in the victim’s address book. The worm, whatever it was, could and did send copies of itself to those folks, but hid its real origin by using other addresses from the list as the forged “from” entry. (Bagle itself may not have this behavior, some combination of email virus infection and propegation produced the aforementioned forged mail in Ms. Brown’s mailbox.)

As luck would have it, I’ve noticed in the last couple days that another of our cronies, Mr. CEJ, appears to also be the victim of email malfeasance; I’ve gotten mails apparently from him containing what I presume to be destructive-on-Windows payloads; a cursory examination of the mail headers makes it clear that they’re not REALLY from CEJ, but that’s a bit beyond most folks’ ken. [3]

Of course, these terse mailings included weird attachments and none of CEJ’s trademark wit, so it was also obvious without looking at the headers that these were virus-generated mails; what we couldn’t tell from that, though, was where they came from. Had CEJ been the localized “patient zero,” I’d have the same mail, but with headers that showed it coming from Roadrunner. Mr. CEJ may not even have the bug; we can’t tell.

What we can tell is that somebody he knows probably does, and a bit of deduction suggests that this person is known to both of us, and to Ms. Brown as well. This isn’t a particular short list of people, of course, but a good portion of the possible victims read this site. No matter who you are, though, if you’re running Windows and Outlook, make sure you’re not infected. And if you’re running Outlook at all, please don’t put my name or email address in your Contacts list. Use my business card, a Post-It, your Dayrunner, a strategically-placed tattoo, or anything else, but not Outlook. Thanks.

Notes:

1. What do I run? My full-time working environment is a Macintosh Powerbook G4; it’s a great machine for ubergeeks, and a great machine for Aunt Millie as well. I keep a PC around for testing and gaming, but I never read mail on it.
2. This is part of the basic operating system, if you will, of the Internet, and isn’t likely to change anytime soon. It’s also potentially useful; I and others use this aspect of the system to automate newsletters, for example.
3. Though your mail program probably hides it from you, all emails come with a couple dozen lines called “headers” that document its path through the Net. Real mails from CEJ start at the outgoing mail server available to him inside the local Roadrunner network (i.e., the one his ISP lets him use — typically you may only use the SMTP server of your ISP, and you cannot reach said server from outside their network); the forgeries have no such entries, and in fact feature incomplete headers.

Our friend Karl used to look like this, but now he looks like this, a difference of about 180 pounds. Way to go, Karl!

Mohney points us to the Official Shotgun Rules. Don’t be a gaper.

Actually, today ol’ Chris scored a twofer, since he’s also the source for this fine piece from McSweeney’s on the potential for electoral trouble come November. Beware the bees.

We hear this a lot. “We’re havin’ a baby,” they say, or “<name> knocked me up!” or “We’re pregnant!” or whatever. It’s sort of like that time in our twenties when everyone was getting married, but messier, and with lots of screaming when it’s over. (Actually, that describes some of the weddings, too.)

So this week, when an as-yet-nameless set of friends (it’s very early) mentioned their mutual status, we were amused and pleased. Then when we found this piece by another woman — someone with whom we started this magazine at this university — it made us feel a little weird.

There’s some sort of weird-ass critter stalking Maryland. Beware. Or something.

Seriously, though, what IS that thing?

IWorkWithFools.com.

The Heathen have been eating at New Orleans’ famed Galatoire’s since the Carter administration, and the Heathen Family ate there for a couple generations before we did; it’s dining out writ large, in an old style rarely done anywhere but there anymore. There are fancier, more haute places to dine in the Big Easy, but if we’re only there one night, we eat at Galatoire’s.

It therefore comes as something of a surprise to us that Galatoire’s has been the victim of a bit of a scandal involving the firing of a popular waiter; a second, more pleasant surprise comes in the form of this book on the history of the century-old restaurant.

It’s about time to go back to 209 Bourbon, we think. You can’t get a decent sazerac in Houston — at least, not since our housekeeper stopped bringing us illegal absinthe — and the presence of a satellite Brennan’s does not render one humid, bayou city interchangable with the king-hell example on the Mississippi.

That’s Associate Heathen Elf’s car on the right. At its peak, the water was about 18 inches in places, and left a highwater mark 4 or so feet up the driveway. Allison, in 2001, produced a similar phenomenon, but came about twice as far up the driveway, and ruined cars parked on Drew.

About 20 minutes after the rain stopped, the water was gone.

How about some eyeball jewelery? You know, implanted IN YOUR EYEBALL.

Mmmmmm, design porn.

WhoIsThatWithJeremy.com is a sort of combination of baby picture site and celebrity-spotting hobby for onetime actor Michael Zorek.

(The Orbach shot is on the third picture page. Richard Belzer is also there, though he looks a little like Skeletor.)

Today’s widely-blogged item: this tag, found on a computer sleeve.

As it happens, there are other uses for the new iPod Mini. Who knew?

Today is 04-04-04.

If you’re really geeky, you might think of it as 100-100-100.

While it’s true this map shows that we have not in fact visited all 51 statelike things, we feel that skipping Nebraska, Iowa, etc., is completely reasonable. Make your own here.

And in honoring said day, we mention in passing this new Post Office initiative, and then direct you to the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time.

More: Wired News coverage of a variety of other net.hoaxes, including the PC EZ-Bake Oven, which we frankly think of as an idea whose time has come.

Try Bookcrossing.com.

Laura calls our attention to a rather unusual product alert from Southern Living, of all places.

…betcha can’t remember what this is called.

A while ago, we mentioned the bird family that had taken up residence in the faux-balcony on the front of our townhouse. We’ve been tracking their growth carefully, much to the chagrin of the mother bird (who gives us The Eye if she sees us) and the cat (who would very much like to play with the guests, and by “play” we mean “eat”).

On Saturday, the babies were, well, gross. They were all pink, completely devoid of feathers, and damned near translucent. Also, their beaks are entirely too large for their heads. Here’s a picture; pardon the glare. We were in a hurry, as Momma Bird had just left.

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Today, they’re actually starting to look like birds. Or, at least, tiny pinkish birdlike things, except for the enormous beaks and lack of discernable eyes. Still, they’ve got some feathers, and you the wings are taking shape. Also, if you walk across the wood floor close enough to the nest, the birdlike things appear to believe Mother is near, and begin waving their heads about, open-beaked, awaiting whatever mush Momma yacks into their gullets.

Hey, nature’s nasty that way. Plus, birds don’t have tits. Here’s a newer picture.

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More updates as they become available.

Modern Drunkard Magazine presents 40 Things Every Drunkard Should Do Before He Dies.

When I moved into my townhouse, the front featured an enormous, Day-of-the-Triffids quality vine-thing that was, frankly, taking over. I managed to kill it, but never removed the dead remnants from the faux-balcony on the front of the house. I sorta liked it, and I’m also sorta lazy.

Yesterday, we realized that a bird’s nest was in the thick of this vine-snarl. This morning, we realized it’s full of tiny baby birds, so small they have no feathers. Since it’s right next to a big picture window, we can see the birds very clearly from inside the house.

Neat. Pix forthcoming.

100% Fewer rampaging gorillas that Dallas!

So we’re minding our own business in our own living room, watching some damn thing on TV, and The Girl nudges me.

“Look at the cat.”

I did. There she was, under the ladder.

Fortunately, we don’t hold with that superstition foolishness. I mean, if we did, we’d probably have been far too freaked-out to work the camera.

(And never-you-mind why the ladder’s in the middle of the living room. It’s closely related to why we had the camera within arm’s reach. Trust us.)

Pajamas. Couch. Bad movies and reality shows on the Tivo. And, when we’re hungry, antelope quesadillas. Mmmmm.

It’s my birthday, one I share with a few other people, as previously documented. For those too lazy to click, the list inclues Adam Clayton and William H. Macy, but also Bill Casey (former evil CIA director) and pseudoreligion founder & charlatan L. Ron Hubbard.

Last night, in honor of said birthday, The Girl managed to surprise me AGAIN (three years running) with a dinner with friends at our new favorite restaurant, wherein I ate entirely too much. She’s the best, she is.

When I first started programming in a real language — as opposed to the BASIC (line numbers and all) that came with my TRS-80 — I was in college. In the late eighties, Borland ruled the development world with their Turbo line of products, so I used Turbo Pascal, and, later, Turbo C and C++.

These tools combined an editor and compiler into a single program, and made the whole linking/compiling/running/testing process a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Because they came on the scene before the rise of Windows, they also had their own interface, primarily cribbed from the keystrokes of (wait for it) WORDSTAR, a by-now-forgotten former giant of the word processing market. I coded enough to know those keystrokes by heart back then, 15 years or so ago.

My coding life was pretty short, though; I quickly moved from jobs where I actually made things work into jobs where I talked about ways to make things work, and pretty much lost any real coding skill. About a year ago, though, I started a project where I ended up contributing no small amount of code, and it felt good and fun, and I remembered what I liked about programming.

Until a couple months ago, I did all this new coding in a fancy modern editor that I still use for plenty of things, but since then I’ve realized I needed to assimilate another powerful editor for use on remote machines, via command lines.

It’s using this tool that brought me to the realization that my fingers, in a control-key-based, non-GUI program, still remember some of those old Wordstar keystrokes, and will resort to using them without telling me. I keep hitting Control-Y to delete lines, which iis most definitely NOT delete-line in emacs. It was, of course, delete-line back in Turbo Pascal and Wordstar. Weird.

You reckon Joy would’ve married him if his proposal went like this?

For some of you, this is just gonna make you sad. And hungry.

Road trip?

Someone has stolen the cover to my grill. The grill itself is intact.

Here are some delightfully twisted cards in honor of today’s saint.

And I say this as someone in the employ, tangentially, of the music industry. Here.

Bad News Hughes breaks it all down for you.

The Renaissance Faire may not be the source of all your problems, but it sure as shit isnÕt helping any. If, while chugging a beer, the phrase, ÒI bet this is going to be the last coherent thought I have tonight,Ó runs through your head, get someone to take you home. Now. The cops never think itÕs as funny as you do.

Jim Anchowers of the world, take note.

Today, we noticed we were running low on red wine glasses. They’re crystal, so we just accept a certain attrition rate. Of course, “crystal” also means “not cheap,” so we were momentarily vexed.

Fortunately, I remembered something. I went to the kitchen closet and pulled out my previously-forgotten, unopened “reserve” box of glasses. Said Erin, “Oh yeah, there was a New Economy there for a while, wasn’t there?”

Heh.

“Googlestalking” is using the search engine to locate bits of information about friends, family, past loves, etc. It’s surprisingly widespread, but itsn’t without its pitfalls.

Last week, I read a really funny story about such a pitfall on a private conferencing system. I discovered today that the author also put it in her blog, so you may all now giggle at her discovery. Call it “Whatever happened to that girl from Chorus, and does she have trouble witih speed limits?“

Pointed out by My Attorney:

Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Speak slightingly of the bottle? Not I. Cheers.

My house has very tall ceilings on the second and third floors, which means very inconveniently placed smoke detectors. In our bedroom, the device is about twelve feet up, if not more. This is, of course, exactly where you want such a device, but this is not without its challenges.

As I am not twelve feet tall, I had not bothered to inspect said detector since moving in. I could see a red light, and assumed all was well. They’re integral detectors with a backup battery, so drain on the battery is presumably quite low — so low, in fact, that it took more than three years for the battery to began circling the drain, emitting its beep occasionally and irregularly, but (mostly) not at night.

We, of course, ignored it.

As the beep became more frequent and persistent, we began asking friends about borrowing ladders, but the logistics were always a bit ugly — neither Erin nor I own a car that can transport an extension ladder long enough to reach the detector. The best option seemed to be walking such a ladder over from Chris and Joann’s place, about half a mile away — a plan that was appealing on a surreal level, at least. (“Where are you going with that ladder?” “What ladder?”)

Saturday night, the beeps reached a fever pitch. Around 4:00 AM, we decamped to the spare bedroom and promised ourselves we’d resolve the battery issue on Sunday, and that we did. At Home Depot — previously maligned in this space, you may recall — we located a weird sort of hybrid ladder made by Gorilla (not “made by A gorilla,” mind you) that manages to be both an extension ladder and a stepladder. It’s quite a clever animal, and compact to boot — in its extension form, it’s good for eighteen feet, but is only about five and a half feet long when fully folded; a similar extension ladder would be twice as long. It wasn’t cheap — $200, vs. about $120-$150 for a regular extension ladder — but the added flexibility more than compensates. It’s certainly cheaper than owning BOTH types, and takes up less space to boot.

Of course, this development makes me wonder how long ladders as a category have gone without significant advances in design or materials. Certainly extension ladders became more viable at greater lengths as materials got lighter and stronger, but they’re still fundamentally a straight-line unsupported ladder, and I’d be willing to guess such devices have been around for thousands of years. In any case, it appears that the Gorilla is the result not of material science advances, but of simple human cleverness, and that appeals to this here geek.

While Chris Kirk was out of town, some friends wrapped every item in his apartment with tin foil. (Via BoingBoing)