Well, he’s not exactly local — he lives in NYC, and he’s from Birmingham, and here I am in Texas — and the degree to which “publication in an Internet magazine” can be construed as “makes good” should be left as an exercise for the reader (particularly when said publication is really just him being snarky at his (real or imagined (HDANCN?) neighbors), but my pal Chris Mohney has a piece in McSweeney’s. (It’s the September 5 top story; there does not appear to be a permanent link yet.)

Mr Bond, your car is ready.

Minor style changes & such. The whole thing should (a) center in your browser and (b) resize with the browser, rendering it useful (?) in any width window. The shoemakers children in this case now have at least nominal footwear, but only on a few static pages plus the Heathen section.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled shenanigans.

At last, a historically accurate George W. Bush Action Figure! (Karl Rove Control Chip and Spine sold separately.)

In honor of my annual hunting trip, a trip in the wayback machine from 1997: Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Thanks to longtime NoGator Hunting Correspondent P.M. for yet another fine trip to reduce the Dove Menace.

You know, this whole Judge-Moore, Ten-Commandments bruhaha has given the rest of the country plenty of time to poke at the rigid, fundamentalist streak that runs through Alabama and the South in general, and its concomitant inability to understand what “separation of Church and State” actually means. As a native Mississippian, though, I have able to take refuge in the fact that for once, the state being lampooned wasn’t my own.

Well, Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove has gone out of his way to make sure everyone remembers that Mississippi is backward, too. Thanks, Ronnie.

Because a triple cheesburger is for losers.

The Imperial Scout Walker Kama Sutra.

Yeah. We can see it from our bed.

The page has been eaten by monsters.

This analysis of the state of Windows as compared to Linux and Mac OS X is as clear a discussion as I’ve seen, and points out what those of us in technology already know: all these worms and viruses spreading like wildfire are actually only dangerous to your machine if you’re running Windows. He begins:

Between the Blaster worm and the Sobig virus, it’s been a long two weeks for Windows users. But nobody with a Mac or a Linux PC has had to lose a moment of sleep over these outbreaks — just like in earlier “malware” epidemics. This is not a coincidence. . . . In its default setup, Windows XP on the Internet amounts to a car parked in a bad part of town, with the doors unlocked, the key in the ignition and a Post-It note on the dashboard saying, “Please don’t steal this.”

What’s the cost of these worms and viruses? Millions if not billions of dollars in lost productivity, not to mention data loss. Microsoft doesn’t care, and they don’t have to; the market has never punished them for offering such ridiculous default configurations, or such absurd security nightmares as Outlook/Exchange. Even their servers are industry jokes; it’s been years since Gartner officially recommended against using any outward-facing Microsoft server, but do the suits listen? No.

At the end of the day, the point is this: Offices not dependent on Microsoft’s poorly engineered software got away essentially scott free this month, while many that are ground to a halt. I wonder how many CFOs will notice?

The, er, “eccentric” behind the Thought-Screen Helment tin-foil-will-save-you site I posted a few days ago wrote me in response:

So here you are. Enjoy.

They’re reviving CAPPS II — the airline traveller profiling system — by involving a private firm. This is ugly shit. Read more at DontSpyOnUs.com.

Perhaps you are aware of Fox News’ attempts to force satirist Al Franken to remove “Fair and Balanced” from the title of his new book ( Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right). Leaving aside for a moment the sheer amusement value of their argument (that Franken will blur and distort the meaning of “fair and balanced”), let’s look at Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly and his rant in (where else?) the Murdoch-owned Daily News, wherein he attempts to assert that Al Franken — one of the originial writers at Saturday Night Live — is not in fact a satirist, and therefore not entitled to use Fox’s catch phrase in a satirical effort. With no trace of irony, he says:

Fox News has become the highest-rated news network on cable because we feature lively debate and all honest voices are welcome. We don’t do drive-by character assassinations, and we don’t denigrate opposing points of view by launching gratuitous personal attacks . . . It makes me sick to see intellectually dishonest individuals hide behind the First Amendment to spread propaganda, libel and slander. But this is a growing trend in America, where the exchange of ideas often degenerates into verbal mud wrestling with intent to injure.

All I can make of this is that apparently, he doesn’t watch his own show. His abusive tactics are seen by millions of viewers a week, and have been well documented. Only a few months ago he cut the mike of a 9/11 victim’s son because he disagreed with his comments. More than this, Franken makes the case quite well that O’Reilly belongs on the cover of this book, given his history of distorting and exaggerating his journalism resume, not to mention his ongoing attempts to cast his upper-middle-class upbringing as poor and humble. Franken has publically busted O’Reilly before, too, since Bill seems to like to claim to have won a Peabody — which, of course, has never happened.

The scary thing is this: people still take O’Reilly seriously.

Which is why nobody will run this in conventional media: Why I Hate George W. Bush.

The US now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to a Justice Department report, 1 in 37 Americans is now serving or has served time; the population has quadrupled in the last 23 years. The Christian Science Monitor examines the situation further.

Marriage is a sacred thing, and can be a beautiful expression of love between two people. But weddings themselves are notoriously stressful and expensive affairs, so there’s little surprise that frayed nerves often fill the hours before the blessed union.

Of course, that’s probably not quite enough to explain the debacle described here, though if we factor “18 year old bride” and “classless dipsomaniacal bimbo” into the equation, we may get somewhere. (RealVideo coverage here as well, not to be missed.)

50 Reasons Why Lord of the Rings Sucks.

The people at StopAbductions.com are refreshingly unconcerned with abductions that, you know, actually happen. Oh, and you’re free to copy their instructions for creating a “Thought Screen Helmet,” if you like. If you make one, I encourage you to wear it at all times so that the rest of us can, um, admire your self-reliance.