Yearly Archives: 2007

Best Headline Today

Posted on by

Passenger ‘hid monkey under hat’, which we found at Majikthise.

A man has been questioned by police at LaGuardia airport in New York after smuggling a monkey onto a flight from Florida by hiding it under his hat.

Passengers spotted the animal when it climbed out and perched on the man’s ponytail, Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell told reporters.

Here’s the best part:

When passengers noticed the fist-sized primate on the flight, they asked the man “if he knew he had a monkey on him”, Ms Russell said.

MUST. HAVE. MONKEYHAT.

This Week’s Onion Pick

Posted on by

DNA Evidence Frees Man From Zoo

PHOENIX — Years of controversy were finally settled Monday after DNA tests conclusively proved that Duane Panovich, an attraction at the Phoenix Zoo for the past 11 years, was indeed a human being, and not a reticulated giraffe from southwestern Kenya.

and

In a statement following Panovich’s release, the zoo said it will appeal the court’s decision regarding its former giraffe. In spite of this, Panovich’s story has spurred new interest in the case of Ernesto, a scarlet ibis that claims to be a contractor hired to remodel the aviary at the Houston Zoo.

More “Good” from the War on Some Drugs

Posted on by

The DC Court of Appeals decided yesterday that there is no fundamental right to lifesaving drugs. Radley Balko has more, but the gist is this:

the bureaucrats at the FDA can now deny terminally sick people the medication that could save their lives. And not even because it isn’t safe, but because it hasn’t been proven effective, at least according to standards set by the FDA.

Right. Bureaucrats are in control, firmly. What’s worse, they cited a medical marijuana case (Raich, which held that the feds can deny pot to sick people who need it, regardless of benefit) in the decision, which makes this case another casualty, at least in part, of our bogus drug war.

One more case of the Republican Stupids

Posted on by

So, you know how it usually turns out that the aggressively righteous and homophobic are the ones that get caught committing exactly those sins that they rail against? Didja notice these goons are almost always Republicans? Yeah, us too.

Well, it happened again: Florida state rep Bob Allen was just arrested for soliciting sex in a public bathroom from an undercover cop.

But it gets better, and stupider, as Scalzi points out.

specifically it’s alleged that he offered an undercover cop a Jackson if he’d let the legislator blow him. This was not a smart thing to do. But having been caught doing something stupid, Allen, who is a pudgy white fellow, has decided to double down on his stupidity by offering what is a truly, spectacularly — indeed, magnificently — dumb reason for soliciting another man for sex: Fear of a Black Planet!

“This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park,” said Allen, according to this article in the Orlando Sentinel. Allen went on to say he was afraid of becoming a “statistic.”

[…]

[L]et’s think Allen’s rationale through:

Allen, during the middle of the work day, was at the park, just minding his own business, enjoying the Florida sunshine or whatever, like you do, when he suddenly noticed that the park was full of black men. Fearing for his own personal safety, he decided that the best course of action was to go into the public restroom, peer over a stall — twice — to locate a black man, and offer that black man $20 and a blow job if he’d just leave him alone.

Go read the whole thing. Scalzi’s on fire with this one.

Dear Dateline: You suck

Posted on by

So, the Predator-catchin’ pseudo-journalists at Dateline decided they’d try to get someone in undercover at the annual DefCon hacker conference this week. We’re sure that, had they succeeded, we’d all hear about how AWFUL and DANGEROUS they all are, and how THEY COULD GET TO YOU RIGHT NOW and all sorts of other alarmist crap, since that’s what passes for journalism on TV these days.

Fortunately for the attendees (and TV viewers), it turns out their mole got found out, so the organizers amended all the presentations to be given to include her photograph and the information that she was in fact an NBC reporter, etc. The first “reveal” was actually set up as an ambush for the reporter, just like their usual victims. Awesome! Hi-larious!

However, the real “WTF?” moment on all this is pretty simple: Here’s who they picked to infiltrate the conference. Dude, that’s a girl. Are you HIGH?

Will they EVER stop with this crap?

Posted on by

One of the Right’s favorite rants is that to fail to support this president is to be unpatriotic. To them, there is apparently no room for dissent, no possible honorable path besides blind obedience and trust in the state, which is of course an idea with no merit at all. In fact, to call it “intellectually bankrupt” would be an insult to bankruptcy.

And yet, they still do it, which means some idiots are actually buying it. We outlien for you now a distinction:

It is the Right that insists its opponents are unpatriotic; that they hope the enemy wins; that they are in Osama’s camp; that they support Al Qaeda; and that they hate the troops because they want to bring them home. They do this because, we assume, it is the best they can do. They cannot admit their failure and their folly because they equate apology and course-changing to weakness. Instead, they want to run out the clock (and troops and country be damned) and slink away in 18 months.

It is the Left that insists none of these ideas have any merit on their face, and that it is in fact supremely patriotic to insist a President be answerable to those who elected them, to the Constitution, to the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution (once held so dear by the GOP when Clinton lived at 1600 Pennsylvania). No one on the Left ascribes treasonous motives to their opponents — well, unless clearly wishing to establish an Imperial presidency is treasonous (and it may be).

Yet More Evidence That Law Enforcement Needs WAY More Oversight

Posted on by

Even at the rarefied level of the FBI, wherein we supposedly place the cream of the law enforcement crop, we’ve got pretty serious problems:

Last week, a federal judge excoriated the FBI for not only hiding exculpatory evidence that would have exonerated four innocent men who served more than thirty years in prison, but for rewarding those who did the hiding and covering up with bonuses and promotions. For this crime against American citizens, American taxpayers will now shell out more than $100 million. Thus far, none of the government agents actually responsible for this crime have been held accountable. Only rewarded.

The Agitator has more on the legislative fallout of this case; apparently, we need a law to force the Feds to disclose exculpatory evidence, as well as evidence that their confidential drug informants may have committed violent felonies, including murder. In their view, we guess, keeping a drug case alive is more important than keeping the wrong people out of prison, and that’s just sick. Balko continues:

This would be a morally dubious policy even if were were talking about matters of, say, national security. But we aren’t. We’re talking about the FBI concealing evidence of murder and other violent crimes, and of knowingly allowing innocent people to go to prison in order to not disrupt drug investigations. In other words, all of this is necessary, the FBI is saying, to keep people from getting high. And when confronted by the United States Congress, the FBI can’t even say outright that this is categorically a bad idea, nor can it promise that it will institute a policy preventing these things from happening in the future.

Back when I was guvnuh, MTV played videos

Posted on by

Like this one:

Of course, in the Heathen homeland, we didn’t have MTV in 1983; we had to watch Friday Night Videos, which was a weak sister at the time (oh! what we’d give for FNV reruns now!).

This video was one of the ones excitedly discussed in junior high cafeterias that year; Phil Oakey’s gender-bending presentation combined with the baritone was pretty transgressive and weird, and then there were those girls. Their names, like Oakey’s, we didn’t know until today: Susan Ann Gayle and Joanne Catherall, both of whom were apparently underage when they joined the band in 1980. The zoom-in-the-map trick at the head end reminds us now of Google, but back then it was pretty jarring and cool (note how the sidestep some of the special effects — the boy and the ball take on the pinkish red hue when they’re inside the circle, but you never actually see the transition).

In retrospect, we figure the Human League was one of the first examples of what we now know as 80s synth pop that we heard down in Mississippi. (Captain Telescope may have other ideas, which we encourage him to share; certainly we’d probably heard Flock of Seagulls by then, and Devo, but they’re all of a piece.) The whole look is there in the video: very 80s clothing, hair, makeup, and sounds, all of which served to remind us that well, we lived in a backwater, since there was essentially zero local music there at the time. (Not counting these guys, since they came later.)

The earlier iconic Human League video is also on YouTube, of course. Amusingly, collateral Googling for this post revealed that the band is actually still active and touring, 30 years on. Neat.

Our favorite quote this morning

Posted on by

“Trust me, a little open-bar scotch and any decent imam will overlook the flaws in your color scheme.”

From this breath of fresh air on the whole process of wedding planning. Granted, the author admits they spent a boatload of cash, but the real point of the thing was that they never once went nuts. That’s key.

What Has It Got In Its Pockets?

Posted on by

There’s a Flickr group concerned entirely with photos of [hat its members carry in their pockets every day; this as opposed to the much larger, and potentially more revealing “What’s In Your Bag?” group that’s been around forever.

We like the pockets version better, especially this one, about Gary, and this one, which includes several options not present in most photos. This guy should probably hook up with him.

Unsurprisingly, Moleskine notebooks and certain telephones are heavily represented.

We did one; we think you should, too.

Pat Tillman Roundup

Posted on by

This is fucking sick. Evidence is mounting, years later, that makes the DoD’s stonewalling regarding Tillman’s death make a bit more sense. First he was killed in battle. Then he was killed in a tragic misunderstanding, a so-called friendly fire incident. These things happen in wartime, of course.

But it’s looking a lot more like that’s not true, either. He may well have been murdered by American troops, potentially for his antiwar views.

Lovely.

It’s working out so well for George, ol’ Rick thought he’d try it

Posted on by

Texas governor Rick Perry has joined George in his anti-science crusade and appointed a nutbird looney creationist to CHAIR the State Board of Education. We shit you not.

The appointee, Dr. Don McLeroy, has repeatedly voted to stifle scientific information in textbooks covering evolution. From an Austin American-Statesman editorial:

In 2001, McLeroy and a majority of the board rejected the only Advanced Placement textbook for high school environmental science because its views on global warming and other events didn’t comport with the beliefs of the board majority. The book wasn’t factual and was anti-American and anti-Christian, the majority claimed. Meanwhile, dozens of colleges and universities were using the textbook, including Baylor University, the nation’s largest Baptist college.

You can find out even more “proud to be ignorant” information on McLeroy’s web site, which is chock full of anti-intellectual — he’s a big fan of Conservative anti-Enlightenment author and discredited moralist Paul Johnson — anti-evolution, abstinence-only claptrap. He is, of course, an Aggie, and lives in Bryan.

Dept. of Obvious Realizations That Escaped Us

Posted on by

Via TechDirt: The RIAA hates webcasters, and doesn’t mind if they die, because webcasters don’t play much RIAA music at all. The RIAA would much rather this distribution channel, containing as it does mostly music created outside its cabal, simply vanish. They have no interest in its continued existence.

Traditional radio, of course, is dominated by a few similarly formated stations that all play RIAA-backed music. 87% of the music you hear on the radio is from an RIAA-member record label. However, when it comes to music on webcasts, the story is quite different. Jon Healy, at the LA Times, points out that only 44% of music on webcasts are from RIAA labels. This, at least, based on the findings of Live365, one of the larger webcasting services out there. So, with more than half the songs coming from non-RIAA labels, no wonder they’re less interested in keeping webcasts alive. And, of course, the situation really is a win-win for the RIAA (in the short-term). It either kills off those webcasters who don’t contribute to the homogenization of music, or it forces them to pay large sums even if they only play non-RIAA music. Of course, this is a strategy guaranteed to backfire in the long run, as it simply pisses off even more music fans who will simply look elsewhere for music.

HOWTO: Slip past your company’s IT drones

Posted on by

Chances are, if you work for a company or organization big enough to think filtering your net access is a good idea, your local IT people are about as bright as bags of hair. Fortunately, Lifehacker has some advice on how to deal with clueless but powermad local admins. You know the type.

(Don’t start with me if you read this and think I’m casting aspersions on your technical skills; if you read this, you’re almost certainly not an idiot.)

The War on Prescription Drugs

Posted on by

For some reason, some bureaucrats think they know more about pain management than doctors.

This is a story about a Florida man imprisoned for two years because he possessed pain medication for which he had a prescription. Fortunately, he’s been released:

Tampa’s Mark O’Hara was released from prison this week. He was serving a 25-year sentence for possession of 58 Vicodin tablets. Prosecutors acknowledge he wasn’t selling the drug. They acknowledge that he had a prescription for it. At his trial, two doctors testified they’d been treating O’Hara since the early 1990s for pain related to gout and an automobile accident.

But prosecutors inexplicably brought drug trafficking charges anyway, because as the article explains, “Under the law, simply possessing the quantity of pills he had constitutes trafficking.”

This is simply stunning. The man was sentenced to 25 years for possessing 58 pills for which he had a legal prescription.

Fortunately, the appeals court called the trial “absurd” and tossed the verdict. Now we’ll see what recourse this man has; from the St Pete times:

He sold two condos, his car and his bread business to pay for the appeal. But the state took the proceeds, according to family friend Eric Mastro, to pay toward the $500,000 fine that came with his conviction.

So, the state ruined him on a bullshit charge AND took 2 years of his life because they think his doctor gave him too many Vicodin. Nice. What goatfuckers.

Today’s Medical News

Posted on by

Because, presumably, the original equipment had long since collapsed into a dried, blackened husk, form which neither blood nor emotion could escape.

Things we’re disappointed about

Posted on by

Today, the usually-pretty-savvy LifeHacker covered some very dubious services that purport to give you the ability to edit, recall, or even set expiration/self-destruction dates for your email.

The short answer here, dear Heathen, is that absolutely NONE of these will EVER work in a reliable way on the open Internet. It’s possible, within some corporate email systems (Exchange, Notes) to do this, but that’s because those servers and clients all speak the same proprietary language. On the Internet, you have to play by the global standard rules, and most mail servers see no reason to honor the requests of mail senders to edit, remove, expire, or otherwise molest emails — largely because once you hit send and the mail finds its way to our mailbox, we consider it OURS, not YOURS, and our systems aren’t interested in deleting our stuff on your say-so.

This is the right answer. This is the way these things SHOULD work. Anything else is a security nightmare and shady besides.

We took a look at one such system today: BigString. Note their initials; it’s prophetic. They claim to be able to “un-send” a message, delete a message after the fact, set expiration/auto-deletion dates, track how often a message is read, and a myriad of other things that, in all honesty, cannot be done with Internet email. Curious, we signed up to see how it worked.

As expected, they’re doing this by:

  1. Turning your email text into a graphic;
  2. Hosting that graphic on their server;
  3. Sending a mail message that references, but does not enclose, that graphic.

At this point, you’re reading a web page, not an email. This means that non-graphic-friendly email clients (Windows Mobile, perhaps Treos and Blackberries, etc) won’t be able to read the mail at all, and people with sane security settings on their desktops will have to adjust their mail configuration before they can see anything. That’s charming, right? Anyway, while they claim they can keep recipients from saving or printing these messages, we had no trouble at all dragging the graphic to our desktop to save for later, printing the file, or forwarding the graphic to someone else. (Also, they’re treading into the same dodgy territory as DidTheyReadIt and their ilk, covered previously.)

It’s just not possible to control, and here’s why: your computer has to make a copy of the file to show it to you. You’re not reading it off their server. You’re reading it locally, and once you have it locally, it’s beyond their control.

Put not your trust in these foolish things. Be careful what you put in a mail, and forget giving bozos like BS time or money. Email is as it always was, and attempts to make it jump through hoops like this are doomed to failure.

(Oh, another thing about Big String: it took them nearly and hour to deliver my test message to me, and test messages sent to my test account at BS have yet to arrive, more than an hour later. This suggests they may have bigger issues than a snake-oil product.)

Queen’s Brian May is Smarter Than You

Posted on by

30 years after dropping out of grad school to become a rock and roll star, he’s completing his doctorate in astrophysics at Imperial College London.

LONDON (AP) — Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics, more than 30 years after he abandoned his studies to form the rock group Queen.

The 60-year-old guitarist and songwriter said he plans to submit his thesis, ”Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud,” to supervisors at Imperial College London within the next two weeks.

May was an astrophysics student at Imperial College when Queen, which included Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor, was formed in 1970. He dropped his doctorate as the glam rock band became successful.

Queen were one of Britain’s biggest music groups in the 1970s, with hits including ”Bohemian Rhapsody” and ”We Will Rock You.”

After Mercury’s death in 1991, May recorded several solo albums, including 1998’s ”Another World.” But his interest in astronomy continued, and he co-wrote ”Bang! The Complete History of the Universe,” which was published last year.

He was due to finish carrying out astronomical observations at an observatory on the island of La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands, on Tuesday, the observatory said.

May told the British Broadcasting Corp. that he had always wanted to complete his degree.

”It was unfinished business,” he said. ”I didn’t want an honorary Ph.D. I wanted the real thing that I worked for.”

(NYT link, but the full text of the wire story is above.)

Where is the love for Central Time? Or Houston, for that matter?

Posted on by

So, we’re confused by something.

Just now, we’re installing Fedora on a test box in Heathen Labs, and it wanted to know what zone we were in. ZERO US cities in the Central time zone were listed.

This is closely related to an Apple phenomenon, wherein the largest city in Texas (Houston) isn’t listed in their city-picker for anything — though Dallas and Austin are. WTF, people? Do you not look at population data?