Hey! You with the the Almanac! Put it down and no one gets hurt. We know you're up to no good with it.

Of course if you're a mur'kan terr'st from Texas we might do something but we certainly won't publicize it. No siree - that would just scare everyone with the truth and we don't want to do that, would we?

Yeah, okay, so Italian unemployment might be higher than ours here in the US, but that doesn't explain why this guy has so much time on his hands. This is one of his more impressive projects.

Kung Faux

It's always a good time when big pimpin' meets kung fu.

Microsoft figures out how to profit from spam. No, not by sending 100 million emails titled "Monster cocks in tight pussies xhgfj", but because "[spammers] would have to invest heavily in machines" all, of course, running Microsoft products. Meanwhile, others see in spam their muse.

Not sure I'd have reacted as calmly as this guy did.

OK, but where are the Deros?

This guy obviously didn't read yesterday's bonus item. He's my hero.

"I have a dream, brothers and sisters, to one day eat a Kentucky Derby winner." Thanks, Onion! (Bonus item: Drinking responsibly during the holidays)

Quick like a bunny now - what centenary was marked yesterday (Dec 17 2003)? If you said "the first manned, powered, controlled flight", take a candy from the jar at the front of the room. If you said anything less well-qualified, go stand at the back of the room.

My point (and I do have one) is this: various characters from around the world have legitimate claims to various parts of the record - the first powered flight, or the first manned flight, or combinations thereof (1, 2), but, at least in the opinion of Scientific American, what was significant about the Wright Brothers' equivocal success was precisely that it simultaneously embodied all three of the properties essential for practical flight.

The first non-Governmental supersonic flight on the same day by Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, a hot contender for the X-Prize, was a nice touch.

I've seen this item used before. If I recall correctly, the projectile goes all the way around the block and hits Wile E. Coyote in the backside.

Sure, GOAT is a big (and expensive) book. But this one is bigger. Much bigger. And much more expensiver, too.

Bloggity bloggity blog. So my mate Steve's girlfriend's name is Barbara Manning. I've just uploaded a whole shiznitload of stuff to my 'Pod, including some compilation CD's I'd never really bothered to listen to. One of them features an artist by the name of Barbara Manning. Both Barbara Mannings (Barbaras Manning?) are from San Diego.

So I'm reading the entry for Ms. Manning (the singer) on AMG and it mentions her obsession with baseball, and it namechecks one Dock Ellis, "the first man to pitch a no-hitter while tripping on acid" ("Ellis, D."?).

Intrigued (nah, make that astounded) I Google him and find his entry in the Urban Legends Reference Pages. Decide for yourself.

Sorry, no big pay-off - just an interesting little trail. But, there is a bonus item: Barbara Manning (again, the singer) is described in the opening paragraph of her AMG entry as "a little too spiky and odd to fit comfortably in the Lilith Fair crowd" - an odd mental image for someone who later collaborated with Seymour Glass as Glands of External Secretion to produce the album Northern Exposure Will Be Right Back", an album described by the good people at Trouser Press as both "a self-indulgent mess" and as "completely charming and engaging" in their review of the artist and her oeuvre.

I know you guys like your Macs, but how long would you line up in order to get into an Apple store? Not likely as long as these Tokyoans did at the opening of the first Apple store in Tokyo last month.

Onion(1) rips off Close to Home(2)?

1 - News snippet section towards the bottom of the page, issue dated 12/10
2 - Strip published 12/5 by Universal Press Syndicate

One of the links on the page Shaun linked to has the following link text:

>Asian gal poses
>Fappage ensues, kittens die
>God is angry now

and helpfully goes on to categorize the link as featuring:

>(Asian, Beautiful, Bigtits, Nicetits, and Posers)

This is cool for two reasons:
1) the terrific piece of haiku
2) use of the term fappage.

Freudian slip: when I read the headline on this story, I made the reverse Jim-Carrey-in-Dumb-and-Dumber slip - I initially read it differently.

Be careful when travelling with a fruitcake through Canadian airports. Who knows what might be in there...

For those of you too lazy to wank (Reprobates passim), you can now also be too lazy to find your own porn.

This says it all...

Go to Google
Enter "miserable failure" as the search terms
Hit I'm Feeling Lucky

Enjoy.

Misthought lyrics...

Head like a hoe
Blanquette de veau
I'd rather die
Than give you Cointreau

Just to follow-up on the Donkers stituation... you can read up on all the good First Christian Fellowship for Eternal Sovereignty info here. I don't have the time to point out all the silliness in this thing. There is the usual Social Security Number as the Mark of the Beast... a good read.

Ohio police interfere with natural selection

"Catherine Donkers, 29, was nursing her baby daughter on an Ohio highway while driving at 65mph. She said she did not stop because she was talking on the phone to her husband and taking notes on the steering wheel. ") Don't worry, though, folks, she has a good reason for this - she's an idiot!

"Donkers, who was driving from Pittsburgh to Detroit at the time of her arrest, was also found guilty of driving without a licence and failing to comply with officers"

Buit seriously, folks - she's not just an idiot, she's a religious idiot, so that makes it OK. Get this:

"Donkers and her husband are believed to be members of an organisation called the First Christian Fellowship for Eternal Sovereignty which instructs that the husband is the head of the family and a wife can submit to punishment only from him. "

Well, err, umm, there are parts of that edict that sound fine to me, but I digress ...

Here's the kicker:

"'When I haven't done anything wrong, why would I... sacrifice my principles?' she told local radio, adding she felt her civil rights had been violated."

I ... I'm speechless.

So now he thinks he's JFK?

If this continues, we'll soon see that halfwit standing in front of an audience, bumbling his way through the some of JFK's more memorable soundbites, as only he can:

"Don't ask what our Unitered States of North America can do for you, what's important here is what it is that it can do for, uhh, ME"

"I want to go ... I mean, I want other people to, uhh, go to this country's great state of The Moon in this century or so, and do a bunch of other things, because they are easy and because they are hard, uhh, because they ARE hard and NOT easy, and not because ... umm, because they'll get me re-selected!"

If he really wants to make like JFK, let me make an offer here - if you can get him to tour Dallas in an open-topped limo, I'll gladly do the rest.

This guy is to erotica what Dubya is to the English language in general.

"Death of Man Beat by Cincinnati Police Ruled a Homicide", reads the headline, but the sub-head reads "Coroner Says Ruling Does Not Necessarily Mean Officers Used Excessive Force". Huh? The malformed past tense in the headline notwithstanding, I'm not sure how these two concepts can both be true at the same time.

Either way, and as egregious as the story itself is, the item that really caught my eye in the text was the mention of "fry sticks". Fry sticks are apparently - get this - marijuana-laced cigars dipped in PCP-laced embalming fluid.

To quote Keanu Reeves in his role as Neo - "Whoa".

This news item from back in January (not sure how I missed it back then) raises some interesting questions:

How do you get change for large denominations?
How does it work if I want to pay-at-the-pump?
Do transactions that are settled this way still allow me to collect the Green Shield Stamps, or get my free glass?