God it hurts. From the marvelous hit & miss new site LOLTheist: Blasphemy is Teh Funneh

What A Day

How about "What's your favorite Cure song?" Nicole Belle writes:

This had to be the most aggravating question during the Dartmouth debate, both in its implication and in sheer unconstitutional glory. Moderator Tim Russert asks the Democratic presidential contenders to name their favorite Bible verse.

Um, Tim, are you trying to say that Democrats need to prove their faith? Nice Republican framing there. And on whole other level, are you confirming the mindset that only practicing Christians should be eligible for the presidency? What if there was a Jew, Buddhist or a *gasp* atheist on that stage? Would that question be considered appropriate then?

"Digital Television Goldrush"

Funniest headline of the day: Microsoft Wants to Take on YouTube, Apple TV

And memory lane...

WIRED News, 4/7/97

As a major broadcasting industry conference kicks off in Las Vegas, Microsoft made a typical splash by announcing its US$425 million acquisition of WebTV Networks, the Palo Alto company that delivers the Net to ordinary TVs.
"We've been planning for some time to use Windows CE across a number of appliances," Microsoft senior product manager Alan Yates said Monday. "The more we evaluated WebTV, the more we saw how well it would fit with our plans."
The move is Microsoft's nimble attempt to outmaneuver its rivals in the digital television goldrush. The software giant is aggressively moving to push — and dominate — the developing merger of PCs and televisions. The purchase of WebTV, which lets users get email and browse the Web on a TV set, will position Microsoft to penetrate the home-television market, which includes 98 percent of American homes.

Why God created in-the-ear headphones.

Verizon Decides What We Can Do With Our Phones (Updated!)

See Update Below!

Despicable.

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

The other leading wireless carriers have accepted the program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.

This is not spam. This is a person signing up for information they wish to receive through their phone, and Verizon claiming it doesn't want to let you receive that information through their service, because it objects to the message.

But legal experts said private companies like Verizon probably have the legal right to decide which messages to carry. The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.

The dispute over the Naral messages is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of “net neutrality” — whether carriers or Internet service providers should have a voice in the content they provide to customers.

Sorry, Mr. Artist, we don't like your art - we're not going to provide you electricity.

Nancy Keenan, Naral’s president, said Verizon’s decision interfered with political speech and activism.

“No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them,” Ms. Keenan said. “Regardless of people’s political views, Verizon customers should decide what action to take on their phones. Why does Verizon get to make that choice for them?”

I wish I could call up Verizon and quit again. They should get SHREDDED over this in the media.

Not. Your. Choice.

Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said it was possible to find analogies to Verizon’s decision abroad. “Another entity that controls mass text messages is the Chinese government,” Professor Wu said.

Updated 10:30am: Verizon knows a catastrophic PR event when they see it coming. Eat Crow, Mutherfuckers.

“The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident,” Jeffrey Nelson, a company spokesman, said in a statement.

“It was an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy,” Mr. Nelson said. “That policy, developed before text messaging protections such as spam filters adequately protected customers from unwanted messages, was designed to ward against communications such as anonymous hate messaging and adult materials sent to children.”

(my emphasis)

"We prevented people from receiving the information they requested on their phones in order to save children from receiving adult materials." Bullshit. It was opt-in, assholes.

Set Tricoder to "I'm Stunned"

Fresh of my shock that the Space Age is only 50 years old, now it's noted that the damn hand-held calculator is only FORTY years old!

Temper Blame

Baseball player gets called a profanity by an umpire, freaks out, hurts himself when his own manager pushes him to the ground, and now he blames the ump for his injury? Sure, the ump was out of line, but Milton, you sound like an idiot saying shit like this.

The Padres claimed Winters baited Bradley, who has a history of losing his temper. Bradley tore a knee ligament when his manager spun him to the ground while trying to keep him from going after the umpire during Sunday's 7-3 loss to Colorado in San Diego.

[..]

First base coach Bobby Meacham and Black said Winters used profanity. Bradley called it ''the most unprofessional and most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.''

''It's terrible. And now, because of him, my knee's hurt,'' he said after the game. ''If this costs me my season because of that, he needs to be reprimanded. I'm taking some action. I'm not going to stand pat and accept this because I didn't do nothing wrong.''

A Book or Something

Gruber:

Which brings me to the jackassiest comment of the day regarding Amazon MP3, from Jupiter Research analyst David Card to the Associated Press: “In and of itself, (Amazon MP3) isn’t enough to change any market share. They have to do a good job at building their store.”

Well, perhaps Amazon can find a book or something about how to build a successful high-volume online store.

Life in IRAF: "There's one hour allotted every day to either fudge ice-cream or volleyball."

The Times Style section outdoes itself, produces the single most irritating shit I've ever read there, about women who date people who make less money than them, and find it too awkward to take.

FOR Whitney Hess, a 25-year-old software designer in Manhattan, the tension that ultimately ended her recent relationships was all right there, in the digits on her pay stub.

The awkwardness started with nights out. She would want to try the latest downtown bistro, but her boyfriends, who worked in creative jobs that paid less than hers, preferred diners.

They would say, “Wow, you’re so sophisticated,” she recalled. A first look at her apartment, a smartly appointed studio in a full-service building in TriBeCa, would only reinforce the impression. “They wouldn’t want me to see their apartments,” she said, because they lived in cramped surroundings in distant quadrants of Brooklyn or the Bronx.

Read it all, if you dare...

Awesome:

Turner, a graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and lead author of the study, says Velociraptor appears to have been a smaller creature than in Jurassic Park, but just as nasty.

"It's sort of as if you scaled up a chicken and then gave it really nasty teeth and big claws on its feet," he said.

Again, no chelicerates, but some fancy lil' critters in this post from BibliOdyssey. They're prints from a man named Adriaen Collaert from around 1600.

More of the endless stream of pleasure for the eyes and mind from Dark Roasted Blend.

My Outrage Is Bigger Than Yours

Exactly.

No sooner had word gotten out last week that New York City was considering the request than politicians of both parties went into spasms of outrage. There was such a piling on of outrage you’d have thought Ahmadinejad had proposed offering a human sacrifice or, worse, memorializing Muhammad Atta. As BooMan says, the piling on turned into a game of one-upmanship, with pols bragging that they were not only outraged, they were more outraged than their political opponents.

At this point in the post I have to stop and declare how much I don’t like Ahmadinejad. And I really don’t, but I resent having to say it. I am, however, obliged to make it clear that I don’t like Ahmadinejad so that righties don’t show up and accuse me of being a Mahmoud lover. What I will not do is enter into a competition to prove how much I dislike Ahmadinejad or if my dislike is sufficient dislike, because insufficient dislike is tantamount to siding with the terrorists.

[...]

Columbia U. President Bollinger makes it clear he’s not inviting the Iranian leader over for tea and cookies. Bollinger intends to challenge Ahmadinejad on matters of terrorism, nuclear weapons, Holocaust denial, women’s rights, and other thorny issues, which I would think would be educational.

See, Scott, this is a World Leaders Forum, which I assume includes world-leaders-in-training. What World Leaders normally do is deal with other World Leaders of all stripes, and it’s good to have some laboratory experience with such things before you go out and practice World Leadership for real. Among other things, real World Leaders are not cartoons and do not go about with “Good” or “Evil” stamped on their foreheads. Real World Leaders are complicated people who probably got to be World Leaders because they are very good at handling other people. Even evil World Leaders can be charming. Back in the 1930s lots of people — right wingers, mostly — thought Hitler was a reasonable fellow. I remember reading that the first time Harry Truman met Joseph Stalin, Truman thought Stalin was an OK guy. This World Leadership thing isn’t as easy as it looks.

REAL magic

From Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, in the segment I got in the mail the other day from (the marvelous) DailyLit:

And Ozma has an enchanted picture hanging in her room that shows her the exact scene where any of her friends may be, at any time she chooses. All she has to do is to say: 'I wonder what So-and-so is doing,' and at once the picture shows where her friend is and what the friend is doing. That's REAL magic, Mr. Wizard; isn't it?

1. Play Chess, 2. Win!

Emperor Lieberman on why he voted with Republicans to reject the bill requiring that troops be given equal time at home to the time that they serve in Iraq:

“It means that Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Independent who has voted with the Republicans on war issues. “The fact that it didn’t get enough votes says that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this strategy of success from going forward."

Yes, our strategy is success, Joe.

Paul Can Resist

Paul Krugman's new blog in the new Times-Selectless NYTimes:

But here’s the thing: new polls by CBS and Gallup show that the Petraeus testimony had basically no effect on public opinion: Americans continue to hate the war, and want out. The whole story about how the hearing had changed everything was a pure figment of the inside-the-Beltway imagination.

What I found striking about the whole thing was the contempt the pundit consensus showed for the public – it was, more or less, “Oh, people just can’t resist a man in uniform.” But it turns out that they can; it’s the punditocracy that can’t.

Microsoft loved its word "squirt" so much in relation to the Zune, now it introduces squircle."

DSC02104, Limon, Costa Rica

DSC02104, Limon, Costa Rica, originally uploaded by lyng883.

Not a chelicerate, but a true winner. Thanks to my friend Armistead for noticing something I'd like...