01/13/2006: OK, the pics from the London trip are finally ready for public display. Why the holdup? Well, instead of just dumping 300 pictures in a photo gallery and leaving you to figure it out on your own, I decided to write up a travelogue about the whole experience. I had a lot of fun writing the whole thing up, but man... writing down everything you do for a week can take a lot of time! But no matter, it's done and you can start reading it here. And that's not the only thing I've been working on, either! I wrote up a quick list of things that the UK does better than the US as well as things that the US does better than the UK. I think it's pretty funny - especially in the "it's funny 'cos it's true" department - so check that out by clicking here. Oh, and remember my Archos portable video player? This London trip was the main reason that I bought it in the first place, so I updated my review of the player with some in-depth looks at the Archos' storage and battery capacity. You can read that by clicking here (scroll to the bottom of the article for the update). One night this past week I had trouble sleeping, and to help me sleep I made up a list of what makes records valuable (or worthless). That little sleep exercise resulted in a brand-new article about record and CD collecting that you can read by clicking here. So yeah, man - I haven't been sitting at this computer doing nothing for the past week... I've been writing up a storm! Yet I must tell ya that that I haven't been working constantly. There have been periods of goofing off, I'll admit. Last week some joker unleashed this goofy picture to the Internet. It's a silly parody of a Mariah Carey DVD cover that pokes fun at her weight issues. You've GOTTA admit though... that picture is about the best Photoshop job I've seen in a LONG time!

01/17/2006: Does the name Sweeney Todd ring any bells with you? It's always sounded like a vaguely familiar (and long and boring) novel by Charles Dickens or W. Somerset Maugham that I was supposed to read in high school but didn't. Boy, was I wrong! Sweeney Todd's origin is similar that of King Arthur or Robin Hood in that it's a bit of a mystery. There's no definite historical figure behind the legend, nor is there one single fictional work that marks the true "beginning" of the story. All scholars know is that stories about Sweeney Todd started appearing in England sometime in the early part of the 18th century. And what a story it is:

Sweeney Todd is the son of a petty thief. As a small boy, he was arrested for a crime his father committed, and as a result spent twenty years in London's infamous (and very real) Newgate Prison. He had a very rough time of it in prison and often has nightmares about the cruelty of the jailers and other inmates. As a result of this, Sweeney became a bit of a "justice freak", albeit a very unconventional one. He's sort of a "People's Justice Freak", the targets of his wrath being wealthy men that exploit the lower classes, evil jailers, crooked cops and the like.

But Sweeney isn't an animal. In fact, he's quite gentle. Whilst in prison he trained to be a barber, and upon his release he opened up his own shop. He's known for giving the best shaves in London. He's a veritable virtuoso with a straight-blade, never once nicking a customer. That is, until one day when an evil prison guard asks for a shave. He gets in Sweeney's chair and goes on about the "poor bastards in Newgate" that "deserve everything they get in there". He laughingly tells Sweeney stories of the things he's done in prison, like raping little boys and knocking over poor people's food (which they had to pay for, mind you). This man just makes Sweeney snap. He slashes the man's neck and dumps his body into the Thames. Several other "bad people" meet similar fates in the coming weeks.

The story of Sweeney Todd is set in the early 1700s, back when barbers were also surgeons. If you had some sort of bodily injury you went to the barber for help, not a physician (they only dealt in diseases). So it wasn't especially unusual when a woman came to Sweeney's shop one day asking for help with a physical problem. What was unusual was what she needed help with: an abortion. Sweeney somewhat reluctantly performs the operation on her, and then checks up on her a few days later at her place of employment - a pie shop. She's not doing so well - her belly's fine, but her drunk of a husband has beaten her up pretty badly, which causes Sweeney's "justice meter" to start going off.

As luck would have it, the same woman rushes into Sweeney's shop a few days later, claiming that her husband was having terrible pains in his abdomen. Sweeney rushes over and discovers that the man has stones, and the only way to extract them to to insert a long pair of pliers up... well, you don't wanna know. Sweeney successfully extracts the stones to everyone's relief. While everyone is looking away from Sweeney - hugging each other, running out the door to tell friends and family the good news, etc. - Sweeney jams the pliers back up the man's Johnson and into his guts, causing massive internal bleeding which results in the man's death a few days later.

Now, here's where the story gets really weird: A few weeks after the husband's death, Sweeney buys the shop next to his so that the woman can go into the pie-making business for herself. One night another bastard offends Sweeney, so he slashes the man's throat. Rather than dump him in the Thames or put him in the crypt of the church next door, Sweeney decides to carve the man up, wrap him in butcher's paper and present him to the woman as "fresh meat, compliments of my butcher brother from up north, recently moved to London". So she starts selling "meat pies" made from the corpses of the unjust people that Sweeney decides don't deserve to live anymore. Fun story, eh?

The woman eventually finds out about Sweeney's little... habit and after some deep thought about it, she decides to "stay" with Sweeney - even though he apparently cannot have a physical relationship. Sweeney and the woman even work out a set of signals with each other - if anyone offends the woman, she sends him next door for a shave with a certain code word. Sweeney will them kill him and butcher him for meat, which the woman will bake into her now much-in-demand pies. 

But just like the story of Adam and Eve, the woman eventually ruins everything. A rich man comes into the pie shop one day having just bought a fancy strand of pearls for his wife. The woman sees them and wants them badly, so she sends him next door for a shave. Sweeney then kills and butchers the man on cue. But then he just loses it when he finds out that the man had done nothing wrong and that the woman just wanted him dead for the pearls. Remember now, Sweeney's a "justice freak". No one that Sweeney's killed so far deserved to die perhaps, but they were hardly innocent, either. But this killing is just for greed, and that's bad. The Sweeney mentally unravels from there, tearing apart the crypt where he had stashed several of his victims. The stink of the freshly dead bodies fills the church, which attracts the authorities and ultimately leads to Sweeney's downfall.

*   *   *

OK, so.. the reason I brought all this up is because when I was in London I saw a commercial for a BBC production of a Sweeney Todd film that was due to air shortly after we left the UK. Because I am a member of a Bittorrent site that specializes in British shows, I was able to download the movie and watch it at home. Just in case you were wondering why I brought all that stuff up about the story. It's a damn good movie, and I'll send it to anyone that's interested.

And speaking of British TV, one of the best new shows I've seen in a long time is a new 8-part series called Life On Mars. Here's the premise: a Manchester cop named Sam Tyler (as played by John Simm) gets into a horrific car accident, which puts him into a deep coma. He wakes up in 1973 Manchester where he is still a cop, only things are quite different. There are no mobile phones or personal computers. Forensics tests which took only hours in 2006 now take two weeks. Cops sit at their desks smoking cigarettes and harassing the "skirts" when they're not assaulting suspects or planting evidence. Sam tries to work his way through this bizarro world, wondering if he's died, or if this is all just a dream. He can sometimes hear doctors and nurses around him in 2006 Manchester when he's not focused on a case or trying to figure out where his is - and especially when he's sleeping in 1973 Manchester.

So on one hand, Life On Mars is a slightly atypical cop show, with Sam playing the "good cop" while his boss DCI Gene Hunt plays the same type of "rough and tumble" cop anyone will remember from 70s cop shows. But on the other hand, the show is also about Sam and his dealing with his "fish out of water" existence. He's used to playing by the rules and having databases with tons of information just a mobile phone call away. Now he's in a world where WPCs (Women Police Constables, or "lady cops") do nothing more than fetch coffee and clean out cells. He's gone from a world where various people of different races and sexual preferences are more or less equal to a world where "darkies" and "poofters" are the regular targets of police harassment. Plus, Sam has to deal with his own existence - is this all real? Is it a dream? Has he really gone back in time? Why did he come back to 1973 instead of 1963 or 1983?

Interested? Click the pic under "What I'm Watching" in the Up To The Minute section below to hit the BBC's site for the show. Wanna see it for yourself? It's out there on the Internet, but I'd be happy to upload the two shows already broadcast to anyone that's interested!

*   *   *

Lastly, some sad, sad news from Bimini, Bahamas: the Compleat Angler hotel and bar burnt to the ground this past Friday. Not only was the hotel the center of Bimini's nightlife, it was also a shrine to one of it's most famous guests, Ernest Hemingway, who frequently stayed there on fishing trips. Many, many priceless Hemingway artifacts are now gone forever in the soft sand of God's own little island. Never again will The Calipsonians rock the night away with their happy island music. Never again will I enjoy a cold Kalik from the bar. And never again will Gary Hart have his picture taken with Donna Rice at this hotel again. 

And this would be bad enough, but it comes on the heels of the crash of a Chalk's Ocean Airlines flight that killed 18 of this tiny island's citizens. God bless the people of Bimini - better times will come, I promise! In honor of poor little Bimini, this month's Useless Fact is dedicated to the islands and her people. Also, a close family friend sent us some pictures of the Compleat Angler the morning after the fire:

01/18/2006: Lots of website updates today. I updated the Rant and also created an archive for older rants, so you can read what made me mad six months ago. I also added a new tip to the Geek Stuff page and updated the Top 10 Celebrity Hot Chicks list for February 2006. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the reason I haven't updated the Hot Chicks list since November is that - contrary to what you might think for reading the lists - I don't sit around lusting after celebs all day. It's actually taken me this long to come up with 10 more girls to add to the list! Lastly, I just wanted to mention that I received my first issues of OK! Magazine a couple of weeks ago. You might remember that I mentioned this site as a source for cheap magazines in the news section a few weeks ago. I was hesitant to mention it, as I hadn't gotten any magazines at that point, but it appears that the site is 100% legitimate. Why pay $72 for a yearly subscription to OK! when you can pay this site $5.95 for the same thing? That's only 11¢ an issue, folks!

01/23/2006: What's going on in the world? Well, the referee that overturned Troy Polamalu's interception in the Steelers\Colts game had a rock thrown through his front window last week. Because Mr. Morelli is also a high school principal, it's not entirely clear if the incident was motivated by his call in the game or simple teenage shenanigans. Oh, and an 74 year-old British lady regained her eyesight after having a heart attack. Doctors are at a loss as to why the woman - who had been blind for almost 25 years due to glaucoma - was suddenly able to see after all those years.

As far as the website goes, I added an article entitled 10 British Shows Worth Watching to the Critic's Corner page.

Oh and by the way... THE PITTSBURGH STEELERS ARE GOING TO SUPER BOWL XL!!! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! :)

02/02/2006: OK, here's a backlog of news for you from around the world:

Guess what is no more? The telegram. For 150 years, Western Union sent telegrams all over the world - I even received one once from "Santa Claus" when I was a wee child - but as of January 31st, the telegram is dead, a victim of email and faxes. You have to give them their props, though - imagine what it must have been like to get a telegram way back in 1851. It must have seemed even more magical than the first time you sent an email - especially given the state of technology in the mid-nineteenth century. Oh telegram, I'll pour some of my 40 on the ground just for you, buddy!

Hey - guess who got busted making illegal copies of movies last week? None other than the MPAA themselves! It seems that MPAA decided to take a break from suing people that make and distribute copies of motion pictures to... make a few illegal copies of their own, in this case the upcoming movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated. The movie is a documentary about the way movies get rated, and specifically looks at why extreme violence is given a pass but anything sexual is given the third degree. You should really click the link and read the story, if only to enjoy the twisted logic MPAA uses to justify breaking the law! Apparently the MPAA was worried about "the safety of [their] employees", since the movie does, in fact, feature many MPAA employees, and not always in a kind light. It seems that piracy is justified in the MPAAs eyes when "safety" is concerned, even though director Kirby Dick "specifically requested in an e-mail that the MPAA not make copies of the movie" (emphasis mine). Ooooops!

Guess who's a complete bitch? Yes, I know - Mariah Carey - but I'm actually thinking about Annie Lennox, who snubbed Orlando Bloom back in December at a London screening of Annie Hall. According to this article from The Superficial, "when Orlando asked for her autograph, she allegedly told him: 'I just want a quiet night. Please leave me alone and get a life'." Classy! Annie Lennox should be so lucky to have someone ask for her autograph these days. For some time now, she's had a reputation of being a pain in the ass not unlike the similar rep of Val Kilmer - and notice how he's not in many movies these days? That's not a accident. The Superficial article continues: "Nobody could understand why she was being so rude to Orlando of all people. It was difficult to believe she didn't know who he was. But it turns out she genuinely thought he was an unusually good-looking fan. Annie was said to be horrified when she realized her mistake, and rushed over to apologize. She quickly gave Orlando an autograph and he gave her a quick kiss on the cheek". Bullocks to that! If I asked Annie Lennox for an autograph and she told me to "get a life" the last thing I'd wanna do to her cheek is kiss it.

Speaking of bitches, guess who isn't going to jail any time soon? Dead or Alive's frontman Pete Burns. Let me explain: Ol' Pete decided to have a go on the British TV show Celebrity Big Brother. If you remember the US version, you'll know that it was a reality show where a group of people are selected to live in a house where just about every square inch is in the range of a video camera. Anyway, the show's ratings are starting to tank in the UK, so they're now doing "Celebrity editions", much like how Who Wants To Be A Millionaire did a celebrity show every week as its ratings went into a death spiral. ANYWAY, it seems that Pete was caught on tape bragging about how the jacket he was wearing was made from gorilla fur. Animal rights people in the UK went nuts and demanded that action be taken. The cops seized Pete's jacket and sent it off for testing - and the results came in yesterday. According to the good people at Britain's Natural History Museum, the jacket was indeed made from "black and white colobus monkeys", which are native to Africa. However, it seems that the coat "was in a poor condition" which led the investigators to believe that "the pelts used to make it were likely to have been imported into the UK in the 1930s or 1940s" - before any import restrictions were put into place - thus making the jacket legal to own in the UK.  Hertfordshire Police say that they'll be returning the coat to Burns shortly.

You know how I'm always ranting about the horrible state of grammar and spelling in America today? Well, if only the criminals would listen... It seems that one Julie Kay Russo (age 32) was arrested on twenty counts of forgery after trying to pass fake payroll checks. Russo had - in all her wisdom - picked a fake company with the word "independent" in the name... only she spelled it "indapendent". The convenience store's eagle-eyed clerk noticed this and called the bank... only to find that the account did not exist. So remember kids - crime doesn't pay - especially if you don't bother using a spell-checker on your forged checks!

And lastly... do you wanna feel old? Jessica McClure - a.k.a. "Baby Jessica", the girl that got trapped in a Texas well in 1987 - in now 19 years old... and just got married! If you're too young to remember 1987, the saga of Baby Jessica was carried "play by play" in near real-time by all the major television networks. It was a nationwide phenomenon that was spoofed on The Simpsons. And so now - the girl that was a wee baby when I was a junior in high school - is married... to a 32 year-old guy, too! What a wonderful world!

*   *   *

In website news, I'm working on an update, but have posted an updated Rant and Useless Fact in the meantime.

02/09/2006: Hey everybody! Aside from the new Steelers SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS landing page, I haven't said anything about the game itself. It was AWESOME! I'm ecstatic, over-the-moon and chuffed! It's SO AWESOME following a team for so many years and finally winning the big game! I'll admit that I had more than my fair share of beer whilst watching the game, but after the final gun went off, my body was so completely exhausted from the 3-hour adrenaline rush that I couldn't stay up for very long. I'm just overjoyed - not only for myself, but for the players, coaches, staff and owners of the Steelers... especially for The Bus, Coach Cowher and the Rooneys. GO STEELERS! THE CHIN WILL WIN AGAIN NEXT YEAR!!!

Also, thanks to our many guests for making the Super Bowl party a ton of fun! I hope you all had a GREAT time and we're already looking forward to the party for Super Bowl XLI!

I'm still working on that one piece I've been working on for a couple of weeks now. I hope to have it posted by Monday at the latest. In the meantime, enjoy some funny celebrity pics I've found in the past couple of weeks:

Britney Spears being a safe driver (and mom):

Wonder why Tonya Harding isn't on Fox's Skating With Celebrities? It's 'cos her fat ass would crack the ice:

Janet Jackson is also in fine shape:

Ever wonder what Pamela Anderson looks like underneath that makeup? Like your average East Gaston trailer-trash whore, if you ask me:

In the last football-related item for the next six months, check out Lawrence Taylor (the original LT) breaking Joe Theismann's leg in a now-legendary Monday Night Football game:

For what it's worth, the readers of ESPN.com named the above play the most shocking moment in football history. And if you saw it on TV, you'll remember why.

OK, this last one's not a celebrity pic, but what the hey? Stare at this picture for 30 seconds or so, then move slowly away from your monitor... Creepy, inn' it?

02/16/2006: OK, I finally gave up and simply polished-up and posted the article I've been working on - a British English Glossary. At the missus' request, I also posted pictures of this year's Super Bowl Party to the Photo Gallery. Plus, please enjoy a rare two-fer in the Useless Fact section! I've gotta run - more later!

02/20/2006: Added a few more words to my British English Glossary and also added a slew of new movie reviews to My Rotten Tomatoes journal. Check it out!

03/08/2006: Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I began working on several articles, but it seems that they're just going nowhere. To make matters worse, I've been busy with what will end up being remembered as "The Great ID3 Clean-Up of 2006". Like a lot of folks, I have a TON of digital music files (around 11,000 of them, to be exact), and for years I've ignored the ID3 tags on them. A couple of months ago, I started cleaning up my music collection, mostly by archiving redundant files. In the past week I've switched from the files themselves to the ID3 tags therein. As you might imagine, adding cover art, genre information and track numbers to 11,000 music files takes some time. I hope to add some updates to the London Travelogue and British Glossary tomorrow though. Oh, and I did manage to update the "Up To The Minute" and Useless Fact sections.

03/10/2006: Hey everybody! It's the day before my birthday... WOO-HOO!!! So OK, let's get on it:

In what must go down as one of the best practical jokes ever, students at the University of California at Berkeley spent a week chatting up rival University of Southern California men's basketball guard Gabe Pruitt via AIM, claiming to be a UCLA hottie named "Victoria". Things got so heated between Gabe and "Victoria" that he eventually gave "her" his phone number, presumably in hopes of a booty call in his near future. A week later USC played Cal at Berkeley. The first time hapless Gabe went to the free throw line, the students started chanting "VIC-TOR-IA, VIC-TOR-IA!" and then yelled out Gabe's telephone number! According to witnesses, Pruitt "glanced back at the crowd in horror and bewilderment before clanking his free throws". Pruitt has apparently knocked down 79% of his free throws this season, but he "missed both shots after the 'VIC-TOR-IA' chants began, and hit only 3 out of 13 shots the whole game". The Bears went on to beat USC by 11 for a season sweep, which my source says is "in part due to the Cal fans' devious psy-ops". To make matters even worse for poor Gabe, transcripts of his IM sessions with "Victoria" are now floating around the UCB campus, with lame lines attributed to Gabe like "You look like you have a very fit body" and "Now I want to c u so bad". AWESOME! Read more about it here.

Here's something shocking for those of us in our thirties: this week Brit superstar James Blunt became the first British act to have a number one single in the USA since 1997! This is really hard for me to believe, since I grew up on British New Wave bands like Duran Duran, the Thompson Twins, Madness and The Jam. Hell, I still remember the "Summer of 'The Police'", when their Synchronicity album was number one for an insane 17 consecutive weeks! (For an interesting tidbit about a song from that album, see my Useless Fact). What's even sadder about this story is that the song that hit number one back in 1997 was Elton John's rehash of Candle in the Wind for Princess Diana's funeral. I have a hard time believing the BBC's assertion that John's tribute to Diana was "number one in the USA for 14 weeks", but you can read it for yourself here. Still, one has to wonder what happened to the Brits in the American charts since the last British number one before Elton John's single (which was popular both for nostalgia and charity purposes) was the freakin' Spice Girls "Wannabe". That's right - if you take Elton out of the mix, the last British number one in the USA was "If you wanna be my lover..." AMAZING! Between the Spice Girls and today, Oasis and Robbie Williams - two acts more popular than Jesus in the UK - have flopped on a spectacular scale here in the US... and that's not even counting lesser deities like Craig David, Keane, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and The Libertines. Amazing!

In more serious news, the German company Loremo AG is about to release an awesome little car in Germany in the next couple of months. Sure, it only has a 20hp diesel engine. Sure, it takes 20 seconds to go from 0-60 MPH. But the diminutive (992 lb) little car only costs around $13,000 and gets roughly 157 miles per gallon, with a cruising range of 807 miles. That's almost enough to drive from Atlanta to New York City on a single tank of gas... or more than enough to drive from Charlotte to Miami! A meatier GT version will also be available with a 50hp engine that "gets around 87 miles per gallon, has a cruising range of 497 miles, goes 0-60 in 9 seconds and tops out at 137 MPH". I dunno when (or if) these cars will be available in the US, but I'm interested. They actually look pretty cool too - well, much better than many of those "eco-friendly" European cars. Check out the main site here or the original story I leeched from here.

Wanna see something a little disturbing? A team of American divers has discovered a new animal in 7,500 feet of water near Easter Island. The animal - which looks like a lobster, but is covered in soft blonde fur - is so unique that scientists have given the animal a new family and genus. Check out the article here just for the picture... It looks like something out of the Alien movies!

As promised, I updated the London Travelogue and British Glossary  pages on the site. Since the London Travelogue is quite a long and drawn out piece, here are the updates for those of you who have already read it:

Concerning an exhibition at the V&A Museum:

Lest you think that the V&A only has piles of "old stuff", we also greatly enjoyed seeing some of the newer collections. One of the first rooms we went into that day was a room full of German radios and original Scandinavian furniture from the 1950s as well as some "space age" plastic furniture from the US and UK circa 1965. The room even had a special section dedicated to "punk design", with a copy of Never Mind The Bullocks, an original Vivian Westwood dress and some fanzines.

It would be the next room, though, that would really get me to thinking. It was a temporary exhibition called Hearwear, which was dedicated to the design of future products that will both enhance our environment and protect our hearing. It might sound silly, but there really were a lot of really cool ideas being shown in this exhibition. Some of the products were avant-guarde enhancements on products already in use today, such as earbud headphones that don't have to actually go inside the ear canal, or a set of headphones with a mobile phone and noise cancelling technology built-in. Other devices were a bit more forward-thinking, such as "ShareWear", a radio-powered microphone that would transmit the speaker's voice directly to any "ShareWear-enabled" hearing aid. It's kind of amazing that someone hadn't thought of that one already, isn't it? I mean, imagine going to a lecture. If you're forced to sit in the back of the lecture hall (and wear a hearing aid), the professor's voice might never reach your hearing aid to be amplified. With something like ShareWear, the professor's voice only has to travel a few inches to the microphone on his lapel, where it will be sent directly to your hearing aid - thus it sounds as good on the back row as it does on the front row.

While a lot of the devices were simply experiments in design - as in "how cool can someone make a set of earbuds look?" - some of these devices were designed by people with an actual scientific background. And these devices - all of them way out into the future - were simply mind-blowing... like a product called "Mute", which looks like standard-issue earplugs, but can block any particular noise the user doesn't want to hear. The neighbor's dog barking? A car alarm going off? Just point your head in the direction of the sound and press a button on the Mute plugs and PRESTO! that sound is gone! And then there's "Corona", a product designed to let you hear only what you want to hear. If you're sitting at a bar with a loud band playing in the background, all you need to do is press a button and you'll hear only the band or only the people sitting next to you - not both! Cool, huh? And lastly there's something like "The Beauty of Inner Space", a device which cancels out sounds we don't want to hear - dogs barking, traffic noise, jackhammers - while simultaneously amplifying sounds we might want to hear, like birds chirping, the sound of wind or the bubbling of a stream. One could theoretically do this today with noise-cancelling headphones and one of those "Nature Sounds" CDs... but what "Inner Space" offers isn't pre-recorded. The birds you hear are next to you, and the wind is just above your head. Walking down a busy London street could one day sound just like walking through a peaceful meadow!

I walked away from the exhibition pondering all of the possibilities of what hearing might be like given a helping hand from technology. I'm no scientist or engineer, but the exhibit got me thinking about the nature of sound and how humans relate to it, and how noisy our world would seem to someone from a couple of hundred years ago. In any event, the whole think just got me to think, and that's what museums are for in my opinion. It's all well and good to just look at pretty stuff, but it's pointless without thinking about the how or the why.

Concerning girls standing outside strip clubs in Soho:

Which reminds me of something Lisa and I noticed a couple of days earlier whilst walking around Soho. You see, they have tons of strip clubs in that part of town. And I guess because of so many tourists wandering around (or so much competition) the owners of these bars like to put girls in the doorways to entice the customers in. But there are just a few teeny, tiny problems with their implementation. First of all, almost every single one of the girls Lisa and I saw were simply unattractive. They weren't hideous or anything, but they were a long, long way from being mistaken for Rachel Weisz, Helen Baxendale, Elizabeth Hurley, Kate Moss or any of the hundreds of attractive English actresses and models you might be familiar with. But that's not so bad, right? After all, with the exception of the upscale "gentlemen's clubs", most of the girls at American strip clubs aren't anything to write home about, either, right? So who cares if they're not so attractive, so long as they're dressed all sexy-like, right? Well, no. For the most part, these girls were dressed in plain ol' street clothes. I even remember one girl dressed in jeans and a powder blue "midriff exposing" shirt... with her belly hanging over the top of her jeans. But that shouldn't matter, right? After all, the sexiest part of the body is the brain, right? Even if she's not the prettiest girl in the world, and even if she's dressed more like Victoria Station than Victoria's Secret, she can still be sexy, no? Wrong again, Jose. Most of these girls just stood silently in the doorways of the clubs all glassy-eyed, as if they were waiting in line at the DMV or the post office instead of trying to get punters in the place. And it wasn't that sad, "stripper that just got into it to pay for college and now she's addicted to coke" kind of glassy-eyed, either. It was just boredom on their faces. And just to put a fine point on the Ironymeter, most of these girls were standing in front of beautiful pictures of gorgeous models, too... as in "professional-quality black and white photos taken by a real professional photographer with a real model taken in a real studio". The girls in the photographs were far too pretty to ever have to lower themselves to stripping for a living. Maybe the girls at the clubs have stared at those beautiful pictures for so long they just can't take it any more. I dunno, but it was both funny and tragic at the same time.

And lastly for today, some updates to the British Glossary page: a longtime reader of jimcofer.com pointed out a couple of things, which I have since clarified. I originally said that "half-six" means 5:30 in the UK, as in "I'll meet you at the pub at half-six". This is completely incorrect. It means 6:30 - in other words, it's shortening "half past six" and not "halfway to six". However, the phrase "half-six" does mean 5:30 in German. Lots of confusion there. I also clarified another entry about stones as a unit of weight in the UK. The same faithful reader said that his grandmother used to get "5 stone bags of potatoes" from his uncles' farms in Northern Ireland. This one much simpler to figure out: it's illegal to sell produce in any units other than metric in the UK.

Oh and the very last thing: Woo-Hoo!!!! 200,000 hits!

03/15/2006: Okay, I added two new reviews today: one on VoiceEclipse VoIP service and another for a Uniden Multi-Handset Phone System. I also changed the folder name where my downloadable wallpapers reside, so as to keep the MySpace asshats from hotlinking my images. I'll be changing the name of the folder at least once a week, so hopefully the rampant bandwidth thievery will stop! Lastly, check out the Geek Stuff page to see how you too can get the grooviest WinAMP plug-in ever:

03/16/2006: The staff of jimcofer.com are pleased to announce the GRAND OPENING of the jimcofer.com message board! By clicking the "Message Board" link in the left-hand navigation column, you too can join the fun thanks to the good people at JaguarPC and Invision. Chat away, me mateys! But before you do that, check out a couple of quick stories about bad celebrity behavior:

Isaac Hayes has quit "South Park"... because the show decided to make fun of his "religion", Scientology. Apparently he had no problem being associated with the show when it was making fun of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. Hayes was quoted as saying "Religious beliefs are sacred to people and at all times should be respected and honored. As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices". Fucking hypocrite.

Also, Britney Spears grossed out several customers at a Los Angeles restaurant... by changing her baby's diaper on a table. You know, like a regular table... that people eat on? One might say that Britney's faux pas is a refreshing view of a celebrity as a normal person. Or you could just be honest and call her a damn hillbilly, 'cos that's what she is. How else do you explain driving around with her kid in her lap, stinking up the first class section of a plane with her feet, going into a public restroom barefoot... or marrying Kevin Federline? I'm surprised that she doesn't shop at Dress Barn, personally.

03/17/2006: HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!!! Two items of interest before I head off to quaff some green beer:

First of all, you might have heard about the guy that ripped up one of those credit card applications you get in the mail and carefully taped it back together again. He filled it out (and checked the "change of address" box and entered his parent's address!)... and received a Chase credit card a few weeks later! You can read the write-up he did on it here. I know that credit card companies always like to say that the onus is on us for our security, but this is just ridiculous! How cavalier can these people be with their customer's credit histories? Let me repeat the story: he submitted a ripped-up application with an altered address... and they sent him a card anyway. It boggles the mind!

Talk about serendipity: the very same day that I wrote about Britney Spears being a hillbilly (that'd be yesterday, BTW) , Britain's Daily Star newspaper reported that Brit was recently rushed to the hospital... after stepping on a hypodermic needle whilst walking across a parking lot... barefoot. Sigh. You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl. For every day that passes, Joy from My Name Is Earl looks more and more cultured than Britney Spears. It too boggles the mind.

That's all for today, but be sure to check out the new jimcofer.com Message Board if you have a few spare minutes. And be careful tonight, OK - drunks (and the PoPo) will be everywhere!

03/20/2006: Remember my article about the future of TV? It looks like Ars Technica has finally caught up with me (hehehe!) by doing this piece about the future of TV advertising in a "DVR World". I urge you to read the story in full, but if you don't have time for that, the future can be summed up in two words: product placement. Remember Eddie Izzard chiding California about its smoking policy in Dress to Kill? Well, it seems that the Golden State is living up to its reputation as the "Nanny State" as the city of Calabasas last week banned smoking in almost every public place. It's now illegal to smoke on the sidewalk, in city parks and even apartment common areas. "Land of the Free", huh? It's almost like living in a dictatorship... oh, and speaking of dictatorships, our "friends" the Saudis apparently had a hand in helping the Taliban destroy the 3000 year-old Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan back in 2001. With "friends" like these, who needs enemies? You know who does need a friend, though? Preferably one with an engineering background? Some of the residents of Clashfarquhar House in Stonehaven, Scotland. It's a house for "old age pensioners" (in US English, an "old folk's home"). It seems that 12 elderly residents have been stuck on one of the top floors since Christmas, because the elevator has broken and cannot be easily repaired. Although the staff considered moving the residents downstairs via stairs, doing so was ruled out for safety reasons. In the meantime, staff have worked overtime making the top-floor residents as comfortable as possible, even going so far as to bring in entertainers. And lastly - now that I've mentioned "old age" and "entertainers" in the same sentence, let's see how the various musical entertainers of my generation have fared:

Eddie Van Halen
(Sure he had mouth cancer, but he looks like a bag lady now!)

Axl Rose
(Makes Joan Rivers look attractive!)

Boy George
(Looks like an average soccer-mad Brit without his makeup!)

Robert Plant
(Actually, the picture is quite good. But RP looks quite scary!)

03/29/2006: Hey everybody! Did you think I fell off the face of the earth? Not hardly! I've been working my ass off migrating the photo galleries to the new software, and now I'm more or less done (with the exception of the gallery for Ty Gerold's birthday party, which I'll get around to doing one of these days). AND SO, I'm pleased to present to you the BRAND NEW JIMCOFER.COM PHOTO GALLERY! I hope you enjoy it! (If you have any questions about any of the new features in the photo gallery, please see the new About This Site page or the Photo Gallery FAQ in the Message Boards). I also updated the London Tips page and the British English Glossary a few days ago, so you might wanna check those pages out, too.

So what's going on in the world? Well, a man from New South Wales, Australia was arrested for DUI in the most stunningly stupid way ever. The man was trying to locate Ayers Rock, and so he stopped his car to ask some people in another car for directions. Unfortunately for him, the rock was less than 100 yards away and the other car was full of cops. People, I can't begin to tell you how stupid this is. Ayers Rock is 1100 feet tall and 5.8 miles in circumference. Unlike the Rocky Mountains here in the US, Ayers Rock is not surrounded by other mountains or blocked by trees or brush. In fact, Ayers Rock is a frickkin' gigantic boulder in the middle of an almost tree-less and hill-less plane. There's no way on God's green earth that any able-bodied person could not see Ayers Rock. To make it all the more funny, when one of the cops came over to give the man "directions", he pointed out that the man's headlights were actually shining on the rock itself.

Have you heard about the "pro-life" Britney Spears sculpture? The one with her giving birth on a bearskin rug? Here's a story about it, although remember: there are some things you simply can't "un-see". Britney's still a little chubby from the whole birthing thing, so she might want to skip staying at a hotel in Norden, Germany that has started charging guests by the kilo for an overnight stay. Apparently hotel owner Juergen Heckrodt became distressed at the number of fat people staying in his hotel, so he now orders people onto a scale so that he can charge them a half euro per kilogram of weight per night. Fat people can breathe a sigh of relief, though: he's capped the total price at his normal rate of €39 a night.

Geologists are all excited now that we might be getting a new ocean. Well, not really. But a part of Africa does indeed appear to be collapsing, and in a few years the "horn" of Africa will be separated from the rest of Africa by a new body of water. What makes this particular story so interesting is the unbelievable speed at which the change is taking place. This might (or might not) happen in my lifetime, but it will certainly happen within the lifetime of my grandchildren. Get the complete scoop at Der Spiegel here. And while you're there, you might wanna check out their piece about the "Secret History of Garden Gnomes". While not steeped in gravitas as the Africa piece, it's still fun.

Lastly, allow me to end on a sad note: it looks like the Bluth family is gone for good. The 'net was buzzing with reports yesterday that Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz was leaving the show, even if (as rumors had hoped) the sitcom was picked up by Showtime. Sadly, these reports are 100% true. And without Hurwitz, you have no Arrested Development. Arrested was the funniest show TV had seen in years - some will say the funniest show ever to grace the tube - and the world is the worse off for losing it. I'm really bummed, but at least Hurwitz and company sent the Bluths off right, ya know? [cue Europe's "The Final Countdown"] Still, I can't help but feeling that they've "made a huge mistake". I just wanna scream "Come On!" and stuff a "banger in my mouth" about the whole thing. Maybe I'll need to find an "analrapist" to talk to... because after all, "I'm a monster"! Well, if it means "taking a chubby, I will suck it up" just to "get one in the can".  Maybe I'll get lucky and Hurwitz will reconsider, which will just "stick an arrow in my buttocks" to see it come back. But probably not. Oh, Arrested Development, how I'll miss you so!

03/30/2006: Wow - a lot of stuff's going on, so I'll get right to it: It seems that Mike Holmgren is still upset about losing to the Steelers (and, according to Mike, the referees) in the Super Bowl. Just Wednesday, Holmgren was quoted as saying that "to have the story of the Super Bowl be the officials, that is crazy". Well, that's just great, Mike... but everyone on the planet outside of the Seattle metropolitan area thinks the story is over and done with. There was only one blatantly bad call - the personal foul on Hasslebeck after the Ike Taylor interception - even if the rest of them were "gimmies". And hey Mike, let's not forget at least two fumbles by Seahawk receivers that were ruled incomplete passes and the blatant block in the back of Ben Rothlisberger after Kelly Herndon intercepted him. Had that been called, you would have been first and ten at your own... what? 16 yard line? Quit yer whining already!

Got tons of cash lying around and nothing to do with it? Why not buy a genuine WWII-era Enigma Machine, now for sale on eBay. I'll be honest with you... when I heard about this auction, the history nerd and computer geek in my collided and SUPER HISTORY-COMPUTER NERD was born, a man that simply must have this machine. Unfortunately, the Enigma will probably sell for at least $50,000, probably more. Much more. There aren't that many Enigma Machines left in the "wild" these days, and given the mystique of this machine, I can imagine that lots of people will give their eyeteeth for one. Don't know what an Enigma machine is? Click here.

Speaking of having a lot of money, do you shop at Whole Foods? If so, you might be interested in this Slate article by Field Maloney. It's hardly a whistle-blowing epic like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, but the article does raise interesting questions nevertheless. Why, for instance, does Whole Foods' produce section display a huge banner listing "Saving Energy" as one of the "Reasons To Buy Organic", when the chain refuses to buy conventionally-grown tomatoes from 20 miles away in favor of ones grown in Chile? Surely the amount of energy it takes to grow a tomato using "modern methods" 20 miles away is less than it takes to ship a tomato in from Chile! Another reason Whole Foods gives to buy organic is that doing so "help[s] the small farmer". This is flat-out playing with numbers. Of course there are thousands of small organic farms in the United States. But the vast (and I mean vast, as in 95% or more) majority of the "organic food" sold in the United States comes from one of five or six massive organic farms in California. Look, I'm not knocking Whole Foods here. They do indeed sell nice stuff. They also pay their employees an awesome minimum wage ($13.15/hour). But things just aren't as rosy and wholesome as they might want you to think.

At the other end of the scale, if you don't have a lot of money, you might shop at Wal Mart. And one thing you might not be able to buy at Wal Mart much longer is UMD discs. UMD discs are movies made for the Play Station Portable (PSP) game console (you might have seen a commercial for an upcoming DVD release: "available April 10th on DVD and Play Station Portable". UMD is the format PSP discs use). Sales of UMD discs have been dismal so far and apparently Universal and Paramount have stopped shipping UMD discs altogether, while studios like Buena Vista (Disney) and Twentieth Century Fox and even Sony itself are scaling back future UMD releases. So what gives? Why is UMD well on its way to receiving Extreme Unction? Well, it might be the price - UMD discs sell for around the same price as DVD discs, even though UMD discs can only be played on a PSP with its small screen. One could argue that teenagers - given limited cash and the choice between buying a DVD or UMD disc - will opt for the DVD. Of course, older people could probably easily afford both the DVD and the UMD disc... but who wants to pay twice for the same movie? Of course, one could also say that it's just the latest in a line of Sony consumer flops: Betamax, DAT, Mini-disc, and Memory Stick... not to mention other failures like the Walkman Bean and and a Sony online music store that only sold music in a format the Sony players could play. The “Not Invented Here” Syndrome apparently has claimed another victim.

Oh, speaking of Wal Mart, some pretentious college kid "lived" in a Wal Mart for 41 hours. The linked CNN article describes as Skyler Bartels "an aspiring writer and Drake University sophomore" who "thought he'd spend a week in a Wal-Mart as a test of endurance, using it as the premise for a magazine article". I'd describe him as a moron with a stripper name, but that's just me.

Lastly for today, Rolling Stone has released their "10 Artists To Watch" list. There's some good stuff on the list, although a band called "TV On The Radio" is named as "David Bowie's favorite band", which, in my book, is reason enough to stay away.

03/31/2006: Some random thoughts:

Morrissey recently said that he'd "rather eat my own testicles than reform The Smiths. And that's saying something for a vegetarian." What the hell does vegetarianism have to do with it? Were it me giving the press conference, I'd say something like: "I'd rather eat my own testicles than reform The Smiths. 'Cos, you know, I'm not a cannibal or anything."

The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin... they were all constantly foiled by Batman and his crusade to save Gotham City. So why the hell didn't those guys just pack up and move to Chicago? If Batman is HERE, wouldn't it be easier to get away with heinous crimes THERE?

Speaking of Chicago, if Marshall Field became a general in the French Army and the stadium where the Bears play were named after him, it'd be "Field Marshall Marshall Field Field".

Terri Hatcher ain't all that.

04/04/2006: Sorry for the lack of updates... I've been sick as a dog the past couple of days. Hopefully I'll feel good enough to write some new stuff tomorrow. In the meantime, I've updated my MP3 lists on the Downloads page and updated the Feedback page so that I now get your comments instantly via email instead of just archiving them to a CSV file that I only check every month or so.

04/06/2006: No time for updates today, but I did want you to know that I've released the Pittsburgh Steelers 2006 Schedule for Microsoft Outlook Calendar today! Download it here.

04/07/2006: Why report the news when you can make some up? The Internet is buzzing with reports that producers from NBC's Dateline show were trolling in Muslim forums, looking for "some Muslim male candidates for their show who would be willing to go to non-Muslim gatherings and see if they attract any discriminatory comments or actions while being filmed". Specifically, they're targeting NASCAR races and football games. Read the whole sad story here and then laugh when the mainstream media whines about getting no respect.

You know where I'd lose any respect people had for me? At the world's largest buffet! It was put together in late March  in - where else? Las Vegas - by Bayer HealthCare LLC for the 75th anniversary of their Alka Seltzer product. The buffet line was over 500 feet long and included 40 different soups, 100 different salads and 150 delectable desserts! There were 510 dishes overall, and each one had to be "identifiably distinct" for the Guinness World Records judges, who were on-hand to certify the event as the "world's largest". Since there was no previous record in this (until now) nonexistent category, the folks from Guinness mandated a minimum of 500 dishes. My belly gets all excited just thinking about this! Around 850 paid $7.50 each to partake of the culinary delights. Proceeds buffet were donated to hunger relief charity America's Second Harvest. How's THAT for irony?

But ya know, when you think of "no respect" you'd gotta think of celebrities, right? Let's plow through some celebrity news with this Friday's special "No Respect" edition: Eminem is divorcing his wife... again, this time after three months of re-marriage. Leif Garrett is going to jail for failing several drug tests, a condition of his probation for a 2004 cocaine-related arrest. On a flight from New York to Los Angeles exactly one week ago, Sharon Stone sat in first-class comfort, while her child and assistant schlepped it up in coach. A spokewoman for Stone actually had the never to say that "First class was sold out. She tried to get them seats in first class but couldn't, and she didn't want them on a separate plane". Well God forbid Sharon actually sit in coach with her child! Bitch! And lastly, in one of those rare events that Douglas Adams warned might make the universe collapse, it seems as though David Spade might be dating Heather Locklear. Ol' Heather isn't my type... but damn, she's way too hot for frickken DAVID SPADE!

And lastly for the news today, a corpse of the one-eyed, noseless kitten that sparked a controversy on the Internet last December over whether photographs of it were genuine or photoshopped has been sold to a museum in New York.  The kitten - whose name was "Cy", as in "Cyclops" - died a day after being born; veterinarians in the owner's home state of Oregon said it suffered from a rare disorder called holoprosencephaly. If a big Latin word doesn't make you think the kitty's real, the fact that two museums - Ripley's Believe it or Not! and The Lost World Museum - were fighting over it should erase all doubt. Click here for the Yahoo! News story (complete with a heartbreaking picture of poor Cy when he was still alive).

In HUGE website news, the TOP TEN TUNES OF THE WEEK list is finally back!

04/10/2006: OK, I know this sounds silly, but I just woke up from the worst dream ever. In my dream Madonna died and it was just like, the saddest thing ever. Yes, I know it sounds stupid, but... you know how real some dreams are? I woke up sad and have stayed sad since then, even though I know that she's alive and well.

And to make matters worse, it was one of those time-shifted dreams where you see the "future" and go back in time, yet know exactly what's gonna happen. In my dream she had bought a house in Lawrenceville, GA (don't ask, it was on the site of my kindergarten), and for some reason I was hanging out with Madge and Guy in their basement bar. I was the person that had to tell her that she was going to die the next day. How awful is that? I'm finally hanging out with Madonna, someone I've loved for years. I'm just soaking everything in, enjoying every moment of it, - as anyone hanging out with some celebrity they love would... yet I know that this person - my hero - is going to die in less than 24 hours. You see what I mean now? It was soooo sad...

The joys of running a website (example 2):

The main reason I switched over to using photo gallery software instead of continuing to use plain ol' HTML was to stop people from hotlinking my images on their MySpace profiles. According to my access logs, lots of people were also leeching images via Google Images: they'd just search for "Rose McGowan" and see a pic on my site, download it and leave.

To stop the hotlinking, I turned "hotlinking protection" on in my site's "Control Panel". When you do this, you are asked to provide a link to an image so that people will know that they're stealing your bandwidth. I used one of the Goatse pictures with "I STEAL BANDWIDTH!" photoshopped in. It seems that some people don't like it, judging from one email I recieved:

Hi,

Either you a Dirty sick freak bastard who deserves to die. Or this link below was purely accidental?

http://www.jimcofer.com/wallpaper/scarlett_johanssen_wallpaper.jpg

Please click on the See Full image.

Fix up the link..that is some f****d up shit.

What if a kid was looking for pics of her?

Im off to wash my brain with some soap..

_________________________________________________________________
realestate.com.au: the biggest address in property
http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au

hehehehehehehe.... I'm always happy to serve the public!

In website news, I added a new tip to the Geek Stuff page.

04/11/2006: One movie that totally exceeded my expectations was George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The movie, based on the "autobiography" of television personality Chuck Barris, deals in large part with Barris' allegations of being a hit man for the CIA. Now I haven't read the book, but the movie leads one to ask all kinds of questions. At first glance, it's easy to think that Barris is either pulling a fast one on us or is simply crazy. But his stories are so rich in detail yet so simple in their nature that one almost stops and wonders if he was indeed hired by the CIA to carry out all kinds of nasty deeds. And then there's the question of motive... Barris was already a household name when his book came out; as far as I know he didn't have any projects coming out that might have benefited from the book's publicity. Why would someone make a story like that up?

But then you have the twisted tale of Candy Jones. Born Jessica Wilcox in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on December 31, 1925, the future Miss Jones had a rough childhood. Her father left when she was three (but not before reportedly crushing her fingers in a nutmeg grater), while her mother was a cold disciplinarian that locked poor Jessica alone in her room for long stretches at a time. To combat the loneliness, Jessica invented several imaginary friends, one of which - a cold, calculating girl named "Arlene" - would never quite go away.

Luckily for Jessica, she was quite beautiful. She became Miss Atlantic City in 1941 and was a runner-up in that year's Miss New Jersey contest. She would parley these contest results into a job as a hostess at the Miss America contest, where she was spotted by a fashion photographer. She then became "Candy Jones", one of the most famous models of the WWII era and the Cindy Crawford of the age. In an era before supermodels, Candy Jones was everywhere: in 1943 she appeared on 11 magazine covers in just one month. Candy was also the patriotic sort, and as America's top pin-up girl she went on a USO tour of the South Pacific in 1944-1945. Whilst in the Philippines, Candy became quite sick, and was treated at an Army hospital by a doctor known only under the pseudonym "'Gilbert Jenson". She eventually recovered and went back to the United States.

Upon her return, Candy married Harry Conover, the first "supermodel agent" and the man that invented the "cover girl" concept. But Harry was secretly bisexual in an age when being bisexual was not accepted. At all. The marriage didn't last: Candy and Harry divorced in 1959. Harry left the couple's three children with Candy, which put her heavily into debt. So to make ends meet, Candy started a modeling school. Life was pretty sweet for Candy, and on New Year's Eve in 1972 Candy married former photographer turned radio show host John "Long John" Nebel.

This is where things get weird: almost immediately, Nebel noticed that Candy suffered from huge mood swings and at times even seemed to be a different person altogether. Candy told John that she occasionally worked for the FBI and that she might disappear for days at a time with no notice or contact from her. To make matters worse, Candy also suffered from insomnia, and it was to cure this that John offered to hypnotize her. But he had no idea of what he was getting into.

Although John had no experience with hypnotism, he was nevertheless successful at getting Candy to get her first good night's sleep in ages. But then he probed her mind some more. He found that she would sometimes regress into a child-like state. She would also sometimes regress into a grown-up alter-ego by the name of Arlene Grant. And the sessions with Arlene scared John so much that he went out and bought a tape recorder to document the amazing (and scary) things that Arlene said.

It was apparently whilst Candy was in the hospital in the Philippines that she was initially approached by men working for the government. After she returned to the States, the FBI asked her if they could use her modeling school as a mail drop. Being the patriotic sort, Candy agreed. A few months after that she was approached by the FBI and asked to deliver a letter to Oakland, California. Since Candy had already planned to go to the area on business anyway, she accepted.

However, it wasn't until she actually delivered the letter that she realized that the person she was delivering the letter to was none other than the same "Gilbert Jensen" that had treated her in the Philippines. After she'd handed over the envelope to "Jensen", he offered Candy a fair amount of money to undergo hypnosis; since she was strapped for cash at the time, she accepted... but Candy also told "Dr. Jensen" that she didn't think she'd be able to be hypnotized. At the time, "Jensen" told her that that the hypnosis had indeed failed; however "Arlene" told John that it had actually worked and that "Jensen" had asked Candy to be a messenger for the CIA. "Jensen" told her that she'd need to be in perfect shape for the missions, so he injected her with "vitamins" - which might have been a chemical designed to bring out the "Arlene" personality in Candy. In fact, as "Arlene" Candy would walk, talk and dress differently, and even wear a dark brown wig. "Arlene" was trained in secret CIA camps at all the niceties of spycraft, like how to use dead drops, how to kill in close quarters silently using common objects and how to hide information under her fingernail polish. And if Candy did all of this under her the guise of her "Arlene" personality, so much the better as far as the government was concerned. As far as Candy knew, she was being sent to all corners of the globe to deliver messages for the government, while in reality once there she'd turn into "Arlene" and carry out some kick-ass mission that would make James Bond proud.

All of this sounded plumb crazy when Candy first told John about it in the early 1970s. But in 1974, the Rockefeller Commission exposed CIA’s now-infamous MKULTRA Project – a mind-control program that began in the 50s and continued through most of the 60s. Suddenly, Candy's case didn't seem so crazy after all. And unlike Chuck Barris' wild stories, Cindy had something to back up her claims: physical proof.

Once John made parts of Candy's story known within their social circles, the couple was approached by Donald Bain, who was interested in writing a book about Candy. Candy let Donald see a passport in the name of "Arlene Grant" that featured a picture of Candy in a dark wig. Candy had found the passport in her home and had no memory of how she got it, or even of taking the picture of "Arlene" featured on it. Candy's friends and business partners recall her taking secretive "business trips" where she had no apparent business going on. In the 1960s, Candy worked for Harper and Row, and it was there that she told her boss, Joe Vergara, that she sometimes worked for the FBI and sometimes went to Asia for them. Also in the 60s, Candy wrote a letter to her attorney saying that if she were to die or vanish that he absolutely was not to reveal the details of her disappearance to anyone - not friends, family members, her children... anyone. And on July 3rd 1973, Candy's answering machine received a message that said: “This is Japan Airlines calling on oh-three July at 4.10 p.m. … Please have Miss Grant call 759-9100 … she is holding a reservation on Japan Airlines Flight 5, for the sixth of July, Kennedy to Tokyo, with an option on to Taipai. This is per Cynthia that we are calling.” Of course, "Miss Grant" would be "Arlene Grant", Candy's alter-ego. And when Candy called the number from the message she was told that no one named Cynthia was at that number.

Was Candy Jones crazy? Perhaps. Were her "memories" as Arlene implanted in her mind - consciously or not - by her well-meaning husband? Perhaps. But that doesn't explain how Candy almost died in a mysterious explosion in July of 1980, nor the passport, her absences, nor the answering machine message. The plot thickens.

Wikipedia entry on Candy Jones - damninteresting.com article on Candy Jones

04/14/2006: My one true love, my life, my passion, my religion, my flame, my goodness, my justice, my ecstasy, my guardian, my protector, my redeemer, my holiness, my gospel, my sweetness, my worthiness, my penance, and all that is good and just within me; the soul I was meant to worship:

04/20/2006: It seems like it's been forever since I updated the site; the truth is that I've been working on three articles but am currently suffering from writer's block on them. Hopefully that will pass and I can get them on the web as soon as possible. In the meantime, some news:

How's this for classy? Third grader Shea was learning to write letters in a class at school, so she decided to use her newfound skills to write a letter to Apple's head honcho Steve Jobs. A large part of Shea's letter revolved around her suggestions for how to improve on the iPod nano, including such general (and vague) ideas as "putting a chip" on them that would allow the user to load lyrics, movies and games on the diminutive players. Anyway, a couple of months passed, but Shea finally got a reply from Apple in the mail. She excitedly opened it, only to find that it was a nastygram from Apple's Senior Counsel, Mark Aaker, asking her (in legal terms no less) to "please do not send" suggestions, and telling her in no uncertain terms that Apple doesn't accept unsolicited ideas. After reports of Shea's story hit the local news, Aaker did call the girl to apologize, and Apple is now reviewing their procedures on receiving letters from children. Check out the story in full at Engadget.

And while I'm on the Engadget tip, the guys over there have posted a picture of the brand spankin' new MobiBLU Cube 2, the newest version of the "World's Smallest MP3 Player". It's a cube roughly the size of a postage stamp on all sides, and the new version kicks it with 2GB of storage, and OLED display and the same MP3\WMA\FM support its predecessor had. I have no comment or rant about this, I just think it's cool, even though I think the future of MP3 players is (and always will be) the cellphone.

A woman in El Salvador is currently in a heap of trouble for attempting to smuggle marijuana and a live hand grenade into a prison... by concealing them in her vagina. Let me repeat that: a woman in El Salavador was arrested trying to smuggle into a prison a live hand grenade that was hidden in her vagina. This story is bizarre on so many levels: first of all, how do you get your girlfriend to do this in the first place? Secondly, how do you even bring it up in conversation? Thirdly, how do you get her not only to do it, but to smuggle some weed in on top of it? And then there's the obvious question of insertion and removal, which I won't even get into in any detail. Just wow, though. It boggles the mind. Thanks to Yahoo! for the story.

And lastly for today... you know how I love history's mysteries? Well, one of the best there is is the mysterious "Voynich manuscript", a book now owned by Yale University. The book is around 240 pages (out of an estimated original 272), and is thought to be dated from between 1450 and 1520. The book is handwritten on vellum and is chock full of illustrations (albeit none as fancy as many other European manuscripts). What makes the Voynich manuscript such a mystery is that it's written in a completely unknown language. There are approximately 170,000 unknown glyphs in the text, yet there are many curious facts about the glyphs: they appear to follow some sort of grammar (certain glyphs appear in combination with other glyphs, just as English has common letter combinations like "ie"), the text seems to follow Zipf's Law (which is a word frequency analysis; for example, Zipf's Law states that "the" will probably be the most common word in an English language text), and the glyphs themselves seem to have been written in a flowing, graceful hand (which suggests familiarity with the language). On the other hand, the "language" of the Voynich manuscript seems to be a mish-mash of European and Arabic. For example, some glyphs appear only at the beginning or end of a "word" (like Arabic, but unlike European languages), yet there are no words longer than 10 characters nor are there any with just one or two characters (unlike either Arabic or European). The origin of the text is unknown. Some suspect that it's the work of Roger Bacon or John Dee (among others). Many scholars think it's an outright 600 year-old hoax. But the sheer amount of work that went into the book - not to mention the thought about grammar and letter frequency, which were barely understood by most people in the Middle Ages - makes me think that it's not a hoax. In any case, the Voynich manuscript has befuddled some of the best cryptographers in the world - even the wunderkids from Bletchley Park. Read more about the Voynich manuscript here.

Oh, I also updated the Useless Fact and Rant.

04/21/2006: When Bad Software Gets Good, and When Bad Software Stays Bad:

People love ragging on RealPlayer. I can't say that I blame them for that, exactly, because for many, many years the player was a steaming pile of poo that ruthlessly hijacked your file association preferences, spewed links all over your computer and generally grew and grew and grew so that what was once a small useful program was now a 50MB monster that tried to do damn near everything. I stayed away for years, but a while back found something I wanted to see on a website that RealAlternative simply couldn't handle. Although I was wary, I went ahead and installed the official RealPlayer anyway... only to be surprised at how sleek it's become. Sure, I wouldn't use RealPlayer to play back non-Real content (that's what WinAMP is for), but I was nevertheless happy to see that RealPlayer 10.x wasn't a resource hog, didn't try to become the default player for mp3 files, and didn't spew shortcuts to Real products into my Start and QuickLaunch menus, desktop or Internet favorites.

I was hoping to be able to say the same thing about Easy Media Creator 8, but boy was I wrong. You see, I've wanted to create "MP3 DVDs" for ages. Because blank DVD discs have around 4.7GB worth of storage space, such a disc could hold thousands of songs. You could put a band's entire discography on a single DVD and carry "The Complete Beatles" or "The Complete David Bowie" with you wherever you went. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. While many standalone DVD players can play MP3 files from a CD-ROM, not all of them do. And many players that do support MP3 playback can play MP3s from CD-ROM discs but not DVD-R discs (this is because their firmware is written to assume that any type of DVD disc is a DVD movie, while CD discs are actually scanned to see if it's an audio CD, MP3 CD, Kodak PhotoCD, etc.). Creating an MP3 DVD that can be played back on any DVD player is something of a challenge, and I thought that Easy Media Creator might have had the problem licked with their 'Music DVD Assistant'. Basically, this is a little program that takes a bunch of MP3 files and converts them to AC3 or PCM audio and lets you make a nice menu system - thus a disc that can play back on any DVD player. I was all giddy with excitement... that is, until I tried playing back an XviD movie file. Windows Media Player attempted to download a codec for it (although it had played back just fine the day before). After getting an error message about being "unable to download an appropriate compressor", WMP went ahead and played the file anyway. However, the movie was really grainy and dark. Green lines would appear on the screen every 30 seconds or so. And playback was... well, not "jerky" but something like that. For some reason, after installing EMC8, WMP now decided to use on of Roxio's codecs instead of the "official" XviD one. After screwing around with it for 45 minutes or so I gave up and uninstalled EMC8.  What I thought was cool was actually harming my system. Oh well... maybe I can use EMC8 in a virtual machine or something the next time I want to try making an MP3 DVD.

In other news, Queen Elizabeth II turns 80 today, and to celebrate the official monarchy website has an interesting section called "80 Facts About The Queen". Did you know that, due to a statute from 1324, the Queen still owns all of the sturgeons, whales and dolphins in the waters around the UK? Or that she sent her first email all the way back in 1976? Click here to read the entire list. And speaking if the UK, ice cream maker Ben and Jerry's is in a wee bit of trouble after releasing a new flavor called "Black and Tan" to "celebrate Irishness". The problem is, while the phrase "Black and Tan" is mostly known in the US due to a drink that's half Guinness and half Bass Ale, it was also the name of a brutal British paramilitary force deployed in Ireland in the 1920s. The Black and Tans were little more than terrorists paid by the British government, so it's something of an insult to "celebrate Irishness" by releasing an ice cream named after a organization that raped Irish grandmothers and burned Irish cities. It's almost as if Ben and Jerry's decided to "celebrate blackness" by releasing "Ku Klux Kream" flavor ice cream. Interestingly though, it appears that Black and Tan (the drink) precedes Black and Tans (the terrorists) by 40 years or so. Also interestingly, the new flavor features "real cream stout and chocolate ice creams mixed together", so maybe it'll be good.

Although the following pages are nowhere near complete, I thought I'd give you the links to them anyway (just to prove that I wasn't lying about the writer's block thing): here's the jimcofer.com Best of IT 2006 Awards page and the jimcofer.com Happy Page! Of course, I'll be finishing these in the next few days, but you can go ahead and enjoy them now! And of course, it being Friday and all, I updated the Top Ten Tunes list (but you RSS people knew that already, didn't you?)

04/26/2006: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55... At first, it just seems like a string of numbers, perhaps one of those "what's the next number in the sequence?" problems you remember from SAT or IQ tests from your school days. But these numbers, I assure you, are something completely different. Although the interesting properties of this sequence were first noticed by a Sanskrit writer called Pingala around 500BC, it was Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa (also known as Fibonacci) who first studied them in the West in the early 1200s. Because of Leonardo's work, the numbers are now known as "Fibonacci numbers" or a "Fibonacci sequence". The pattern is created, simply enough, by adding the two previous numbers in the sequence to make a new number, and adding that new number to the previous one in the sequence and so on.

But why is this interesting? Because the Fibonacci sequence is literally everywhere in nature. According to Wikipedia, the "branching patterns of leaves in grasses and flowers, branching in bushes and trees, the arrangement of pines on a pine cone, seeds on a raspberry, and spiral patterns in horns and shells" are all done in Fibonacci sequences. The genealogy of male bees follows a Fibonacci sequence. I can personally tell you from my days in Liberal Arts Math that, with the exception of 2 or 3 oddball varieties, every species of daisy has a number of petals that follow the Fibonacci sequence.

But wait - there's more! If you divide a Fibonacci number by the one that precedes it, you'll notice an interesting pattern starting to take shape. The result of the equation always remains close to 1.618, which is also known as the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is considered (in the West, anyway) to be one of the most aesthetically pleasing forms around. The facade of the Parthenon is based on the Golden Ratio. The shape of most books and cereal boxes is based on the Golden Ratio. Read up on this stuff... it's really interesting!

In today's "30 Second News Roundup", a Georgia Tech student was arrested last week for giving aid to terrorists, Miller has invented self-cooling beer cans which they'll roll out next year, Sony has invented an adjustable bathtub, and one of superchef Mario Batali's restaurants is now for sale.

In website news, I added a new book review and updated the Useless Fact.

04/27/2006: The house I lived in for the first 14 years of my life initially had an unfinished basement.  Shortly after my sister was born, my parents decided to turn the basement into a rec room. When it was complete it had carpet with checkerboards and hopscotch grids dyed right in, a pool table, one of those old "console" stereo systems, and a groovy set of white leather chairs that looked like barrels from the back. But the piece de resistance of the rec room was the touch tone telephone. Although touch tone phones were fairly common in corporate settings, it was truly novel to have one back in your home back in 1976. Friends and family came over to see the rec room yet spent the most of their time playing around with the phone. Kids from the neighborhood came over just to monkey around with the newfangled phone and its 12 buttons.

Although home phones have changed greatly in the past thirty years, most touch tone phones still come with the same 12 buttons that the phone in 1976 had. But some folks with military experience might remember a time when some touch tone phones had 16 buttons. Those phones were part of the military's nuclear weapon-proof Autovon network:

Autovon stood for "automatic voice network" and was deployed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Panama, Asia and the Middle East. Although there have long been rumors about Autovon cables being buried in concrete shafts deep underground, in fact much of the system buried in simple dirt 30 feet or so below the street surface. The system used a variety of means to achieve its "nuclear weapon proof" status, such as building in redundancies via satellite and microwave. But perhaps the most interesting feature of the system was the calling priority feature, and that's where the 4 extra buttons come in.

To make a basic phone call, the user would simply pick up the phone and dial the number. But if the user had some vital information that absolutely positively had to get through, he could press one of the red buttons before dialing to assign a priority to the call. The priorities (in ascending order) were P (Priority), I (Immediate), F (Flash) and FO (Flash Override). So, for example, when a "Priority" phone call reached an exchange, a "regular" phone call would be dropped (if necessary) to allow the priority call to go through. Multiple levels of call priority were needed because of the expected deluge of calls to telephone exchanges in Washington DC and other important areas in the event of a nuclear attack. So a major on a "Priority" call with some important (but not critical) information could get bumped by a general with crucial information on an "Immediate" call. The most interesting option of all is (of course) "Flash Override" - a priority that was strictly limited in its use to the President and members of the National Command Authority. As you might guess, Flash Override trumped any and all traffic on the network; Flash Override was designed to allow the President to get his call through no matter what.

Although the system has long since been replaced, it's still fascinating to read about it (check out the Wikipedia article or this site dedicated to the Autovon system for more details). It almost makes me wish I had my own Autovon system - wouldn't that have come in handy for calling TicketMaster when Madonna tickets went on sale?

04/28/2006: If my latest posts seem to be all "math and science geeky", it's because I've totally fallen in love with a website called  damninteresting.com. The site has dozens of... well, damn interesting short stories about some of the greatest, wackiest, scariest, most mysterious, most cutting edge and\or little-known but highly important people and events in history, medicine, technology and nature. Take, for example, the twisted story of Lake Peigneur, Louisiana. On November 21, 1980 the fresh water lake was 11 feet deep almost uniformly. By November 23, the lake had become a salt water lake that was 1300 feet deep. What happened in a single day that could do that? Read the story and find out. Anyway, my recent blog entry about Candy Jones was directly inspired by an article from damninteresting.com and two subsequent entries (about Fibonacci numbers and the Autovon military phone system) were inspired by the site in general. I just thought I'd let you know why I was going all geeky on you.

Here's a quick round-up of some interesting news:

- Did you know that the horrible disease "restless leg syndrome" is something that the drug companies simply made up? [Captain Renault] I'm shocked... shocked to find this to be the case! [/Captain Renault]  Check out this BBC article for the whole story.

- Poor Yahaya Wahab. The Malaysian man almost had a heart attack when he opened his phone bill and found charges in the amount of 218 trillion dollars  from Telekom Malaysia. Unlike similar stories here in the US though, Telekom Malaysia still hasn't admitted that it was a simple billing error and has even hired a collections agency to go after Wahab. Ouch! Here's the story.

- In a stunning display of animal rights idiocy run amok, a restaurant in Italy was fined 688 euro ($855) for displaying live lobsters on ice under animal cruelty statutes. The story is here.

- A Note For Grammarians Out There: The "euro" is the currency adopted by the European Union. The plural of "euro" is "euro" and it's not capitalized. I wish someone at Reuters would send its editors a memo on that.

- In yet another classic case of the music industry doing something other than what it preaches, Sony Music is being sued by The Allman Brothers and Cheap Trick over claims of unpaid royalties for digital music sales. So remember kids: if you rip a CD to your hard drive you're a thief. If you screw the people that made those CDs out of money they rightfully earned... you're just a music company executive.

Website updates: I split the Blog Archive into several pages to make for faster loading times and also updated the Top 10 Tunes list for this week.

05/03/2006: Hey everybody! Glad to see ya! Thanks for stopping by! I added a new page to the site that's all about passwords: why certain passwords are bad, how you can create your own secure passwords, and how to create your own "best practices policy" for them. Check it out if you have a chance! And now... on to the news:

Thanks to the Internet, you can check out Rush Limbaugh's mug shot or Marcia Cross' wedding registry online.

Lars Werner has released a new version of one of my favorite programs: SizeMe.

Irritated by the number of students playing online poker, chatting with friends via instant messaging, and\or surfing eBay in class, some professors are banning laptops in their classrooms.

The US Post Office is looking to hike postage rates again. However, this is not just another across the board increase. Rates for larger (i.e. heavier) items would actually decrease a bit under the proposed changes. Most interestingly, the USPS seems to be taking a cue from Britain's Royal Mail and is proposing a "forever stamp" that would be valid for first class postage indefinitely, no matter how much rates might increase in the future. Simply put, you could buy one of these 42 cent "forever stamps" next year, throw it in a desk drawer and use it to mail a letter ten years down the road when a first class stamp costs $8.

The New York Post is reporting that always classy Courtney Love "pulled a Paris" by exposing her muff to a crowd of lesbians during her performance at the Women's Night benefit for the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center. The Post says that Love "gave frequent shots to the appreciative crowd of her pantyless nethers", but also reports one front-row guest as saying that "it looked like she could use a good wax".

Electronic advertising signs on Toronto's rail system were apparently hacked to display the message "Stephen Harper Eats Babies"... it looks like someone out there doesn't like Canada's new prime minister. The signs are turned off for now as technicians scramble to figure out how the hack happened.

And lastly for today, it seems that birch wood would make for perfect speaker cone material, except for the nasty habit the wood has of splitting. Engineers at JVC finally figured out how to make a speaker from birch... by soaking it in sake! What a fun world we live in, folks!

05/05/2006: A quick update today as I get ready for a short vacation:

Guess what? A Kennedy crashed his car near the Capitol yesterday! Surprisingly, it wasn't Teddy, but rather it was his son Patrick Kennedy, who is a member of the House for Rhode Island. NOT surprising: the fact the Kennedy appeared to be intoxicated. What's with these Kennedys and their cars, anyway?

Speaking of cars, Ars Technica has a great piece about how high-tech thieves are making off with ultra-luxury vehicles armed not with crowbars and lockpicks or slimjims... but with laptops! It seems that English football star David Beckham has had not one but two of his pimped-out rides stolen in Spain by thieves using a laptop, the right software, and a radio transmitter. The thieves prey on cars equipped with wireless keyfobs instead of traditional locks. And not only will the software allow them to unlock the doors, it can also allow the thieves to actually start the car as well as disable any alarms or tracking devices. Like many other aspects of crime, the way the thieves are going about it is actually quite clever.

NOT clever are some hospital workers in the UK that brought down a mission-critical hospital server... by stashing so many mp3s and videos on it that the database application used for patient data couldn't expand anymore, thus causing the server to crash. Now, I'm as cavalier as the next guy when it comes to stashing music on a work machine... but the admin in me wonders why users even had file sharing access on a mission-critical server. As reprehensible as the user's actions might seem, they were only able to do it because some slack administrator allowed them to do it. Read the full story here.

I guess by now you've all heard about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's new "blooper reel". It seems that the America-hatin' terrorist somehow screwed up and allowed American troops to capture an original, non-edited videotape of himself (and many of his followers) making asses out of themselves. Some of the funnier highlights: in the video al-Zarqawi released on the Internet, he's lookin' all badass firing a machine gun; in the non-edited version, he's seen walking away... while wearing New Balance tennis shoes! In another part of the tape, he can seem to figure out how to change the setting of the gun from single shot to fully automatic, and one of his followers has to come help him. And perhaps the funniest thing of all: after firing the gun several times, al-Zarqawi wishes to hand off the gun to one of his assistants... who then attempts to grab the gun by the barrel... and ends up burning himself... 'cos you know... after firing several dozen rounds, the barrel of a machine gun gets hot. I know NOTHING about guns and even I knew that! Check out the video here. There's also an alternate link for the RSS people and just in case the ABC link goes dead.

What the hell's going on in Italy? First there was the story I reported on earlier about the restaurant that was fined for displaying lobsters on ice (animal cruelty, don't cha know?), and now comes news of a brouhaha over transgender people and toilets. Vladimir Luxuria became Europe's first successful transgendered politician when she was elected to the Italan parliament last month. And now Italian lawmakers are all in a tizzy about which toilets Vladimir is supposed to use. Some have called for a new "transgender only" toilets, while others think she should just visit the ladies'. Whatever the case, Alessandra Mussolini - the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini - apparently has no love for Vladimir, as she was recently heard on state television saying "better a fascist than a faggot". Nice.

You ever eat at Rally's? You might want to rethink it if you do - Lisa Griffin, a resident of Mishawaka, Indiana - claims to have found a razor blade in the fish sandwich she bought there the other day. And unlike the "Wendy's chili finger" incident, at least Lisa has some evidence going for her: doctors at St. Joseph Medical Center in South Bend have said that the injuries to the inside of her throat are consistent with razor blade injuries. Read all about it here.

Did Lisa's story make you shudder? If it did, you might be like some of the people that had some amazing test results in an study that appears in today's Science. It seems that for some people anticipating pain is as painful and stressful to the body as actual pain. In the study, test subjects were given several "test shocks" to their feet, ranging in intensity from "barely perceptible" to "a needle jab into the foot". They were then given the option of having a mild shock in a few seconds or a weaker shock several seconds later. Most people opted not to wait, but some people took it to the extreme and would take the highest level shock immediately versus waiting 30 seconds for the weakest one. Apparently "MRI scans showed that a brain network that governs how much pain people feel became active even before they were shocked, particularly the parts of this "pain matrix" that are linked to attention — but not brain regions involving fear and anxiety. The more dread bothered someone, the more attention the pain-sensing parts of the brain were paying to the wait". Quite an interesting story - read it here.

And lastly, some interesting news from Africa: although the mainstream American press would have you believe that Islam is an unstoppable monolith marching its way across all continents, it seems that African imams are deathly afraid of Christianity... and they have every right to be, since their own figures suggest that as many as 16,000 African Muslims are converting to Christianity every day. Sheikh Ahmad Al Katani, the president of The Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya was recently quoted on Al-Jazeerah as saying that "[t]he number of Muslims in Africa has diminished to 316 million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa.... When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people, we see that the number of Muslims has diminished greatly from what it was in the beginning of the last century. On the other hand, the number of Catholics has increased from one million in 1902 to 329,882,000". If anything, the 16,000 number may actually be far too low - other reports seem to indicate that 100,000 Africans are converting to Christianity every day (although not all are Muslim). Read the full story here.

05/17/2006: I'm back - updates soon!

05/19/2006: One of the greatest "what ifs" in human history involves the "Trent Affair" of the American Civil War. As you might know, the Confederate states were eager to get official recognition from European countries. This would not only give the Confederate states a huge prestige boost, it would also have given them access to loans of money, war materiel and possibly even troops to fight the Northern states. To help secure this recognition, the CSA dispatched James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana to Havana, Cuba, where they boarded the British ship R.M.S. Trent en route to meetings with British and French authorities respectively. However, on November 8, 1861 the Trent was boarded by sailors from the USS San Jacinto. The two Confederate diplomats were arrested and taken to Boston while the Trent was allowed to continue to Britain.

Not surprisingly, this action set off a firestorm of controversy in the United Kingdom. The British Prime Minister - Lord Palmerston - is alleged to have begun an emergency cabinet meeting about the affair by throwing his hat on the table and declaring, "I don't know whether you are going to stand this, but I'll be damned if I do". Public opinion in the UK tended to favor the South over the North in the conflict, and support for the Confederacy was even greater amongst the people that had the means of making their opinion count: the gentry and aristocracy. As you probably know, one of Britain's key industries at this time was the export of cotton and wool fabric, and the overwhelming majority of the raw cotton sent through British looms came from the American South. Not surprisingly then, support for the Confederate states was nearly unanimous within this key British constituency. A letter was therefore quickly dispatched to the American Secretary of State demanding the release of the Confederate diplomats as well as an apology to Britain for this blatant disregard for maritime law. The British also began ramping up on war materiel such as boats, guns and ammunition, and they also began moving troops to areas where they could be quickly dispatched... to go to war against the United States.

As you might imagine, Palmerston's letter put the Lincoln administration between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the war effort had been pretty dismal for the Union side thus far, and the capture of Mason and Slidell was one of the few positive things that happened for them in 1861. Letting the diplomats go would have been political suicide for Lincoln, especially in the early stages of the war when the Confederates were winning battles left and right. But on the other hand, Lincoln had to deal with the spectre of Britain's military might being brought to bear against the United States. The Union was barely treading water in its war against the Confederate states... what would happen if the entire Royal Navy showed up off the east coast? What if the 50,000 British troops Lord Palmerston was hastily organizing landed in Virginia or North Carolina? Or what if those troops were landed in Canada instead and launched a southerly offensive towards New York? As it was, the Minister of Militia and Defence in Canada, John A. Macdonald (who, interestingly enough, would go on to become Canada's first Prime Minister) was sufficiently alarmed by the whole affair that he ordered the doubling of Canadian militia from 50,000 to 100,000 troops, with Nova Scotia alone raising 45,000 troops ready and willing to invade the United States. And although the Trent Affair mainly involved the United States and the United Kingdom, France expressed a strong interest in joining Britain in going to war against the United States should Britain take that step. One wonders if President Lincoln was able to get any sleep at night knowing that the United States was not only at war with itself, but was on the threshold of going to war with the two of the mightiest empires in history.

As it turned out, he needn't have worried. On December 27th, Secretary of State William H. Seward announced that the Confederates would be released... but also noted that Britain had apparently adopted America's "neutral rights" policy - which was the primary cause of the War of 1812. Thus, the British got most of what they wanted (the Confederates freed), yet the Americans weren't forced to apologize for the action. But still... the whole Trent Affair is sweet, sweet candy for historians. Had the Americans responded differently, or had the British not waited so long for an American response... the North American map might look quite different today.

So... how about a sawed-off double-barreled dose of the news?

What the hell is wrong with Pete Doherty? Doherty - Kate Moss' former beau and singer of the Brit band Babyshambles - has taken the phrase "bad boy" to the extreme by getting arrested almost weekly for drug possession offenses, shooting heroin or smoking crack cocaine in plain view of audiences, shooting an unconscious groupie with heroin, submitting portraits painted with his own blood to "an undisclosed London art gallery", talking fans and groupies into doing odd jobs for him like picking up his cleaning or tidying up his house, abandoning automobiles on a whim in London... not to mention skipping an uncountable number of court appearances for any and\or all of the above. Now Britain's favorite Froot Loop is accused of allegedly spraying an MTV cameraman with a syringe of blood during a recent interview. Of course, there's not much point in including the word "allegedly" in the previous sentence, as Doherty was aiming directly for the camera. What a class act! Even his bandmates seemed embarrassed by the whole thing. Check out the full story (complete with screen captures) at The Superficial.

How's this for strange... A group of people volunteered to help clean up Ben Nevis, Britain's tallest "mountain". Little did they know that they'd find a piano near the 4,418-foot high summit! Nigel Hawkins, director of the John Muir Trust, which owns part of the mountain, was quoted as saying that "[his] guys couldn't believe their eyes. At first they thought it was just the wooden casing, but then they saw the whole cast iron frame complete with strings. The only thing that was missing was the keyboard, and that's another mystery". A cookie wrapper with an expiration date of Dec. 12, 1986 was found underneath the piano, suggesting that the piano has been sitting there for around 20 years. Check it out at Yahoo!

I'm usually proud to call myself a North Carolinian... but I'm not so sure after reading this story about a guy in Denver, NC that accidentally burned his house down... by using a bowl of paint thinner as an ashtray. It seems that one Stevie Spencer was painting his house and decided to take a smoke break. He'd forgotten that the bowl had paint thinner in it, and, thinking it was just water, he tried to put his cigarette out in the highly flammable liquid. This set a bunch of nearby papers on fire. By the time the fire department arrived, the house was a complete loss.

Imagine taking your kids to the local zoo on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Imagine the cool breeze, the smell of cotton candy in the air, and the laughter of your child as he or she checks out the lion or chimpanzee cages. Now imagine walking up to an exhibit and seeing a pack of Sloth bears chasing a Barbary macaque monkey, mauling it to death, and greedily eating it up right before your eyes. Well, you wouldn't have to imagine it if you were at the Beekse Bergen Safari Park outside of Amsterdam last Sunday. Dozens of families watched in horror as the bears chased the monkey into an electric fence, where the poor guy was stunned. Although the monkey recovered from the shock, it made the fatal mistake of trying to hide in a nearby structure. One of the Sloth bears finished the monkey off and dragged him outside... and a feast began! Visitors stood there in shock. Kids started crying. Pfffffft! European pansies... where do they think bears in the wild get their food from? Whole Foods? Pizza Hut? Please. Do they not have Animal Planet over there?

Speaking of food... last night was Taco Night at my house! The missus and I made them at home of course, but the next time we're in Scottsdale, Arizona we could choose to eat at... the Pink Taco Mexican Restaurant! It's not a joke, folks. There already is a Pink Taco at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, but plans to open a second location in Scottsdale have hit a snag recently as a handful of citizens - including Scottsdale's female mayor - have complained to the company about it and are fighting the company's liquor license application. Here's my favorite line of the story though: "Restaurant spokeswoman Lisa Perez said the company's name comes from one of its menu items." Riggggghhhhhhht.

Lastly, a bit of trivia for you: did you know that there's a very specific difference between "and" and "&" in movie and television writing credits? The ampersand symbol (&) means that the screenplay was written by two people working collaboratively, while "and" means that the first person listed wrote the original story, then someone else was hired later on to rework the story. So "Screenplay by George Washington & Thomas Jefferson" means that Washington and Jefferson worked on the story together, while "Screenplay by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson" means that Washington originally wrote the story and that Jefferson came along later and rewrote it. "Screenplay by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson & James Madison" means (as you might guess) that Washington originally wrote the story, but Jefferson and Madison (working as a team) came along later and rewrote it. I thought about this little bit of trivia as I was watching a show this week - Huff, I think - where the episode's writing credits looked more like an equation from algebra than English: "Screenplay by George Washington & Thomas Jefferson & James Madison and James Monroe and John Adams & Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson and John Tyler & James K. Polk". To break it down for ya, three people originally wrote the script (Washington, Jefferson and Madison). The script was later re-written by one person (Monroe) and later still by another team (Adams and Van Buren), then was re-written by yet another individual (Jackson) before finally being rewritten by yet another team (Tyler and Polk). Honestly, I had to pause the video to parse the thing, it was so complicated! 

05/22/2006: Imagine walking through the Brazilian jungle. The lush canopy overhead nearly blocks out the sun and your senses are almost overwhelmed by the sights, sounds and smells of the rain forest. Now imagine that you come to a clearing in the jungle. At the other side of the clearing, you see Tara from Gone With The Wind, complete with Anglo-Saxon owners, African slaves... even a Confederate flag flying proudly in the wind. Although it might sound like a fantasy - and perhaps the image of an exact copy of Tara in the Brazilian jungle is a bit overblown - I assure you that many as 10,000 Southerners packed up at the end of the Civil War and became Confederados in the Brazilian wilderness.

Here's how it happened: towards the end of the Civil War, Brazil's Emperor Dom Pedro II - one of only two Brazilian monarchs, and the only native-born monarch in Brazilian history - knew that the Southern cause was lost.  He knew that his country needed the expertise of experienced cotton farmers, so he sent recruiters to the American South offering subsidies and tax breaks to unrepentant Confederates as an incentive to move to Brazil. Even though no less a figure than Robert E. Lee cautioned Southerners against such a move, thousands packed up everything and started life again in the jungles of Brazil.

Although as many as 60% of the Confederados would return to the South as conditions improved back home, at least 4,000 of them became permanent residents of Brazil. The Confederados were quite insular at first, but by the second generation they had intermarried with native Brazilians and began to learn Portuguese. And although Don Pedro's program might not seem like a smashing success, both the immigrants and the Brazilian government considered it one. The Confederados brought modern agricultural techniques with them, and that knowledge was quickly disseminated throughout the nation. The settlers also brought watermelon, corn and pecans with them, which are still valuable crops in Brazil to this day. Fried chicken became popular in Brazil due to the Confederados, and other dishes like chess pie and vinegar pie  - once ubiquitous in the American South, but increasingly hard to find today - are still popular in Brazil. The Confederados also established the first Baptist churches and public schools in Brazil - and they even sent their women and slaves to the schools, which was considered scandalous in Brazilian culture at the time. 

The descendants of the Confederados established the Fraternity of American Descendants, which acts much like the Daughters of the American Revolution or Sons of Confederate Veterans here in the US. There is also an annual festival called the Festa Confederada where Confederate flags fly, descendants walk around in Confederate uniforms or hoop skirts, people dance to songs popular in the South during the antebellum era, and people of all kinds enjoy Southern food that has increasingly taken on a Brazilian flair. The festival takes place in the city of Americana, which until recently had the stars and bars on the city's crest. Also in Americana is the Campo Cemetery. Being Protestants in an overwhelmingly Catholic land, the Confederados had to establish their own cemetery. In 1972, future president Jimmy Carter visited the cemetery with his wife Rosalyn, as her great-uncle - one of the original Confederados - is buried in Campo.

No time for news today; I'll post some great stuff tomorrow, though.

05/23/2006: Wars have been started for any number of reasons: money, land, religion, xenophobia... you name it. But one of the strangest beginnings to any war in history has to be the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739-1748). Under the terms of the Treaty of Seville (1729), the British agreed not to trade in Spanish colonies. To enforce this treaty, the Spanish were allowed to board and inspect any British ship in Spanish waters. In 1731, the British ship Rebecca was boarded and searched under the terms of the treaty. However, it seems that the Spanish minister and the British ship's captain - Robert Jenkins - had some sort of disagreement that resulted in the Spanish minister cutting Jenkins' ear off. For some reason, this news didn't make it back to Westminster until 1739, but when it did the British public weren't happy. British Prime Minister Robert Walpole reluctantly declared war on Spain, and the War of Jenkins' Ear had begun.

The war itself wasn't particularly interesting - which is why you've probably never heard of it before - but several interesting things did result from the war:

The main British victory in the war was the capture of the Spanish silver mining town of Puerto Bello (in what is now Panama). A street in London was renamed in honor of the victory, and thousands of tourists visit the world-famous Portobello Road Market each year.

The admiral that led the attack on Puerto Bello was named Edward Vernon. Vernon was famous for wearing an old wool coat called a grog whilst on deck. It was during the War of Jenkins' Ear that he issued his famous order that Royal Navy sailor's daily rum ration was to be cut with water. Because the admiral was known as "Old Grog" behind his back, the drink quickly became known throughout the Royal Navy as "grog", and thus a naval tradition was born.

A "victory banquet" was held in Vernon's honor upon his return to England. It was at this banquet that Britain's nation anthem - "God Save the King" - was first performed publicly.

And lastly, the captain of the Royal Marines that served under Vernon on his flagship was an American named Lawrence Washington. Washington would be so impressed with Vernon that he would return to Virginia and name his mansion "Mount Vernon" after him. As you've probably figured out by now, Washington's half brother George would go on to inherit the mansion after Lawrence's death in 1752.

History is fun stuff, ain't it? In fact, the only thing more fun than history is... the news! 

Remember my story from last Friday about Pete Doherty? I forgot to mention in that piece that he often gets beaten up by his ex, famed Britwaif Kate Moss. Apparently, she's beaten him up again, and this time over the same blood-spraying incident that caused me to report about him in the first place. Now I'm hardly a buff guy or anything, but damn... getting beaten up by Kate Moss? That's pretty pathetic!

And speaking of celebrity ass-beatings, it's old news now, but you might have missed it: Tommy Hilfiger and Axl Rose went a few rounds at the NYC club The Plumm last week. As The Superficial notes, I can't imagine anything more surreal then being punched by Tommy Hilfiger. Who knew Tommy was so crazy?

Here's some good news for science and technology fans: the Discovery Channel announced last week that American Chopper and several other non-educational programs will be moving to The Learning Channel in the near future, so that Discovery can go back to it's science and nature roots! As one that absolutely cannot stand the mullet dreck that is American Chopper or Dog The Bounty Hunter, I give this move a standing ovation.

I'll also give a standing ovation to the tens of thousands of Turks that stood up for secular government last week and protested the ruling Islamist party. The hows and whys of the story are kind of complicated, so here's a link to the LGF story about it.

The latest scuttlebutt on the IT street? That Steve Ballmer might be out as CEO of Microsoft. Although the Vole seems to have been in a rut for the past couple of years, I'll believe this when I see it.

And last, but certainly not least... Did you hear about Britney Spears stumbling and almost dropping baby Sean last week? Well, after the incident, she broke down in a nearby restaurant. Here's a picture that somebody snapped of her (be sure to click the thumbnail for a larger view):

Ya know, if this were any other singer - Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Christina Aguilera... even Moooooriah Carey - I'd feel bad for her. But since it's that stupid hillbilly from Louisiana... I just think it's funny.

05/26/2006: If you're a fan of the modern world, you owe a debt of gratitude to John Wilkinson. Wilkinson, whose father was an ironworker and a part-time inventor, was one of those fantastic industrialists that envision the entire world using his product in as many forms as possible. In Wilkinson's England, people would sit at iron tables eating off of iron plates using iron cutlery in iron houses. Wilkinson was such a fan of iron that he was buried in an iron coffin and had an iron obelisk for a tombstone. But it wasn't iron tables or iron plates that led John Wilkinson to change the world... it was cannon.

Prior to Wilkinson, almost all manufactured goods were made "in-house" by individuals. By that I mean that each product - and all the component parts therein - were either made by the manufacturer or someone local to him. Take a cabinetmaker, for example. It's entirely possible that a cabinetmaker would have made all of his tools himself, as well as all of the component parts of a cabinet, such as the nails. And when he made those nails, he might make them the length of his pinky finger or as thick as his favorite book - or any other measure he chose. He might have "outsourced" his nail production to a local blacksmith, but that blacksmith was just as likely to use some other non-standard measure (such as the diameter of a coin) to determine the length of a nail. And, of course, a cabinetmaker or blacksmith in another town might use an altogether different measure to make his nails.

Of course there were large factories, especially when it came to complex products like carriages. Making a carriage required a blacksmith, a slew of carpenters and an upholsterer at a minimum. But a factory like this was more like a collection of tradesmen working under one roof than the single entity we think of today. If an upholsterer were to leave the factory, his replacement might have completely different tools and components than his predecessor. Of course, the factory owner had the ultimate say in the quality and appearance of his products, but by and large the tradesmen were left alone to do what they did best. And most of the time, "their best" was close enough.

Unfortunately, "close enough" won't cut it when it comes to making cannon. And back in the eighteenth century, soldiers had to worry about dying from their own cannons exploding as much as from enemy fire. Wilkinson's foundry was one of the first to use one of James Watt's new and improved steam engines to power the blowers and hammers. But then Wilkinson did something revolutionary: he used the steam engine to create a new type of boring machine that machined the cannon to within fantastic tolerances - millimeters to be exact... very exact. Such accuracy was almost unheard of back in those days, and it didn't take Wilkinson long to figure out that he could make interchangeable parts for cannon and many other products. So if something broke, one could simply have a stash of spares on hand that could be easily swapped out... instead of having to track down the craftsman that originally made the part or hire a new craftsman to reverse-engineer the part.

Gunsmiths were the next to jump on Wilkinson's bandwagon. Although the British army had been using "standardized" muskets for years, the fact that most of the parts were machined by hand meant that many parts that should have been interchangeable were not. If a part broke on a soldier's musket, it wasn't uncommon for him to have to try up to five different replacement parts to find one that actually worked... even though they were supposed to be the exact same part. The techniques pioneered by Wilkinson meant that gun parts should be replicated to within a couple of millimeters of spec, and any part would work in any gun.

Other products would eventually join Wilkinson's revolution. Pocket watches, for example, were once playthings of the superrich. Once large scale production began, their accuracy increased and their price dropped, such that they were a more or less common item within 50 years.

There's an interesting postscript to this story: "Iron Mad" Wilkinson was a believer of (and major investor in) The Iron Bridge in Shropshire, England. It was built in 1779 and was the first major iron bridge in the world. The Iron Bridge would be the direct inspiration behind the future iron bridge in Newcastle and its bigger brother in Sydney Harbor. The Newcastle Bridge is pictured on the Newcastle Brown Ale label... so if you're tipping back a few this holiday weekend, think of John Wilkinson and how he changed the world!

*    *    *

Have you seen the Ford commercial with that obnoxious "beep beep" song? God, I *hate* that commercial!

Taylor Hicks was named as the next American Idol on Wednesday. Now please SHUT THE HELL UP about American Idol until January (or whenever the hell that Spawn of Satan show comes back).

Folk singer Joan Baez is living in a tree again.

Perhaps not surprisingly, 1970s daredevil Evel Knievel - now 67 years old - is now in so much pain that he can barely get out of bed.

Bobby Flay loves Savannah.

Hotshot New York Times food critic Frank Bruni recently rented a car and ate his way through 42 fast food meals, mostly in the Southern states. One big winner was Atlanta's The Varsity, which had two entries in Bruni's top ten list for the trip with their chili slaw dogs and onion rings. Others on the top ten list include the classic chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A, the tots from Sonic, Wendy's chili and the four-piece Original Recipe combo from KFC.

Elton John's new musical Lestat, will close this Sunday after only 39 performances. A colossal failure, Variety called the show "beyond rescue", while the New York Times called it "a musical sleeping pill". Couldn't happen to a bigger bitch, no?

An 18 month-old baby had her left hand severed whilst touring a chocolate factory in Hawai'i a couple of weeks ago. If you ever wondered why most factories don't "do" tours any more... I guess this is why.

Someone at Ars Technica posted a link to this site, which contains 100 pictures of 100 different residents in Hong Kong's oldest public housing project. Each apartment is 100 square feet. It's an interesting study that's worth a look.

*    *    *

I updated the Rant and Useless Fact. Enjoy!

05/30/2006: Can you name the Hollywood bombshell that partied with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, then developed a communications system to defeat them both... which is still an integral part of modern wireless communications?

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna on November 9, 1913. Aside from being amazingly beautiful, Eva was as smart as a whip, too. When she married her first husband - Friedrich Mandl, a German arms manufacturer - it wasn't long before she knew his trade inside and out. And it was at various social events that Kiesler ran in to Hitler and Mussolini... which is ironic, because both Kiesler and Mandl were Jewish. Mandl did everything he could do disguise his Jewish background, even converting to Christianity. Mandl was also insanely protective of his wife, and had her followed nearly everywhere she went. Between her husband's obsessive jealousy and Germany's ever increasing anti-semitism, Kiesler just couldn't take it anymore, so she fled to London.

It was in London that Kiesler met movie legend Louis B. Mayer - the last "M" of MGM. Mayer hired her on the spot and personally changed her name to the one film buffs and geeks everywhere still remember: Hedy Lamarr. She had already appeared in several European films - including the sexually provocative Ecstasy. But it would be in Hollywood where she'd have her greatest success, appearing in Algiers (1938), White Cargo, Tortilla Flat (both 1942) and Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949).

The story might have ended there, had Lamarr not had harbored a burning hatred for the Nazi regime. Lamarr teamed up with composer George Antheil to develop an amazingly clever way to scramble radio transmissions. Are you familiar with player pianos... you know, those old-timey pianos that used to play themselves? Player pianos usually had a roll of paper mounted just above the keyboard. The roll - about the size of a roll of paper towels - was fed through the player and on to a take-up roll - much like the film in a projector. The paper had holes cut into it at various locations; as the paper was fed through a "reader", a metal pin either went through a hole (causing the corresponding note to be played) or there was no hole for the pin to go through (and a note was not played). What Lamarr and Antheil did that was so clever was to hook a piano roll up to a radio transmitter. Because if you attach a piano roll to both a transmitter and a receiver, and if the rolls are identical and in sync, their broadcasting and receiving frequencies can be rapidly and automatically changed - which means that the enemy can't easily listen in.

Lamarr and Antheil received U.S. patent #2,292,387 for their work. Sadly, the US military didn't see the utility of such a system at the time, and the patent had nearly expired by the time the military did, in fact, begin using a similar system in 1962. It wasn't until the 1980s that such a system was used for commercial applications, such as newswire services, aircraft navigation, and communications to commercial trucks. Later on, spread spectrum technology - which such radio frequency hopping is now called - would be used in most 2.4 and 5.8 GHz cordless phones and CDMA cellular phones, as well as WiFi and Bluetooth devices.

BONUS GEEKERY: The first piano rolls weren't very sophisticated; they were nothing more complex than your basic music box. However, as time passed, several techniques were invented that allowed roll makers to record every aspect of a performance, such as pedal usage and the strength with which the performer pressed down on the keys of the special "recording piano". There are several surviving piano rolls that captured the performances of highly-respected composers like Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Edvard Grieg, Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninoff and George Gershwin. I, for one, would love to hear Mahler's work played "live" by the composer himself.

06/01/2006: Imagine a scenario where Venezuela wanted a military base somewhere in the Caribbean and offered the United States a nice discount on oil if it would move the residents of Puerto Rico off their island, demolish all existing structures and lease it over to Venezuela in perpetuity... Sounds improbable, doesn't it? Perhaps Puerto Rico isn't a good example - with a modern infrastructure, a population of almost four million people and thousands of American businesses on the island, it would be a monumental task (logistically as well as politically) to pull something like that off. But what if the island's population was much smaller? Could something like that happen?

Well, something like that already did. You might of heard of the island of Diego Garcia on the news. Located in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia is one of the largest American airbases in the world, and planes regularly take off from the island for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. What you probably haven't heard is how it came to pass that America got an airbase there in the first place. It's a story of realpolitik, nuclear weapons, a few thousand Creoles and the mysterious powers of the British monarch.

It all began in 1961. The United States had long wanted an airbase somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Aside from the obvious concerns (oil), this was the heart of the Cold War, and the US was keen to keep an eye on India, which had long flirted with the Soviet Union. An American rear admiral landed on the island on that fateful year and found it to be almost perfect: Diego Garcia was centrally located, surrounded by reefs and a deep trench to keep tsunamis and typhoons at bay, its huge lagoon could easily be dredged to allow huge naval ships to dock there... and there weren't a lot of people on the island.

In fact, the island was originally uninhabited. It was devoid of any signs of human existence when the Portuguese landed in the early 1500s. By the 1700s the island had come into the possession of the French, who established coconut plantations on the island with the help of slave labor from Africa and East India. But then Napoleon happened, and the island came into British hands as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. And so, from 1814 to 1965 Diego Garcia was a lonely outpost of the British Empire, governed as a dependency of another nearby British possession, the island of Mauritius.

But then America decided that it wanted the island. To woo the British into clearing the island, both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations offered significant discounts on Polaris missiles if the Brits would ready the island and allow the US to put an airbase there. But the Brits just couldn't pack up everyone and move them away - that would have been illegal, plus there might have been significant fallout for Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. So the Foreign Office went to work: they split their Indian ocean possessions into different groups; Diego Garcia (as part of the Chagos Islands) now became part of a brand-new crown dependency called the "British Indian Ocean Territories". A year later, the Crown purchased the islands and all of the plantations (which had long since ceased being profitable).

Everything was almost ready for the Americans to take over... but there still remained the issue of the island's inhabitants. It started off quietly - natives that temporarily left Diego Garcia for nearby Mauritius or the Seychelles to shop, go to school or seek medical attention were simply not allowed to return. Sir Bruce Greatbatch, governor of the Seychelles and defaco "sanitizer" of Diego Garcia, rounded up all of the island's beloved dogs and either shot them or euthanized them using the exhaust from the American military's Jeeps. Some were even disposed of in a furnace at one of the plantations while workers watched, which sent a not-so-subtle message: "get out". Many took the hint and left of their own accord. The remaining population - referred to as "Tarzans or Men Fridays" in Foreign Office memos - were then legally declared to be "migrant workers from Mauritius" and forced off the island, with each resident allowed to carry a single suitcase. Of course, these people were not migrant workers, most having lived on the island for five generations. But if the island had no native population and only a few thousand "migrant workers", who'd complain about moving them off the island?

Aside from the native population itself, no one complained. And that's because of the mysterious powers of the British monarch. Many are under the impression that the modern British monarch is a powerless figurehead. And compared to her predecessors, she is. But she still has an amazing amount of power within the royal prerogative - a body of customary powers that common law recognizes as the monarch's alone. The British monarch has the power to appoint and dismiss ministers, dissolve Parliament and call elections, pardon prisoners, declare war or an official emergency, grant charters of incorporation, collect tolls, mint coins, issue and revoke passports, expel any foreign national from the kingdom, create new common law courts and universities, appoint bishops and archbishops in the Church of England, print the authorized version of the Bible of use in the Church of England... and issue Orders-in-Council. It's the last thing that interests us at the moment. An "Order-in-Council" is something like an executive order issued by the American president, although the scope of what a legal Order-in-Council might contain is historically much broader than an executive order (which only affects the executive branch of the American government and\or are used for matters of national security). Here's how an Order-in-Council works: the Queen's privy council (a group of advisors analogous to the president's cabinet for purposes of this discussion) agrees on what needs to be done and writes up a legal document that details what needs to be done. The Lord President of the Council then meets with the Queen and reads the Orders aloud. As soon as the Queen says "agreed", it's done. It's law. It's that simple. And because governing overseas territories is one of the royal prerogatives, Parliament doesn't even need to be informed of the order (much less approve it). And thus, one day in 1973, the Lord President of the Council read a document that proposed to move the "migrant workers" off the island. Elizabeth II simply said "agreed" and it was done.

Any Order-in-Council can be declared illegal, though, and that's what happened on May 11, 2006. The High Court declared that a subsequent Order-in-Council which banned the islanders from returning home (which itself followed a 2000 court decision that allowed the islanders to return to their home) was illegal, and the natives are now (technically) allowed to return to Diego Garcia - although the British government will almost certainly appeal this decision and it's doubtful that the American military will simply roll over and let the natives have their land back. Read more about the sad (yet intriguing) story of Diego Garcia here and here.

BONUS FACTOID: People are prosecuted in British courts in the name of the Crown. Rather than "the people of the state of New York vs. John Doe", cases are known as "The Crown vs. John Doe". It's widely thought in British legal circles that the origin of the monarch's immunity from prosecution is that a rational person cannot prosecute himself!

*    *    *

Can you believe that this is Kevin Federline? Yes, the Germans are still crazy. Use iTunes? You might be interested in this small (free!) program that allows you to stream your playlists to any web-browser. Hopefully, it won't make this list - PCWorld's top 25 worst tech items of all time (yes, Microsoft Bob is on the list!). And lastly for today, Slashfood is reporting about a new cheese that actually lowers your cholesterol, and how the cheese's secret ingredient could be added to dozens of foods in the future. Oh, and they also wonder why lemon bars go last on a plate of various baked goods. I never thought about it before, but they're right!

06/06/2006: There are around 2.8 billion people in Europe, North and South America, Japan and India. A huge chunk of these people are middle class. Neither rich nor poor, the middle classes are able to obtain comfortable shelter, an adequate supply of food, clothing and basic utilities like electricity and sewer service, as well as education for their children and entertainment for themselves. But I wonder how many people in the middle classes know that they owe their existence... to a flea!

Well, not to a flea, exactly. But rather Yersinia pestis, a bacteria that piggybacked on the flea... which in turn piggybacked on rats in the holds of ships. You might have guessed that I'm talking about the Black Death (a.k.a. the bubonic plague) which happened in Europe and the rest of the world between 1347 - 1351. Little is known about the epidemic outside of Europe except that it was also found in the Middle East, India and China and killed around 75 million people worldwide - around 34 million of which were Europeans. Of course, most of us learned about the Black Death in high school, yet we were often never taught about what the disease actually meant at the time and what happened after the disease had run its course.... which is odd, because one of the most important things to come out of the Black Death was the middle class itself!

A caste system is a social construct where people are born into a particular class and can never rise above their station. Although China and India are famous for their caste systems, Europe had one for nearly a thousand years too: the feudal system. The feudal system worked this way: at the top of the pyramid was the lord, who owned a piece of land ranging in size from a couple hundred acres to thousands of square miles. Underneath the lord were knights and clergy to protect the lord and his lands both physically and spiritually. Underneath those folks were merchants and tradesmen like blacksmiths and coopers. And at the bottom of the pyramid were the serfs, who were sharecroppers that paid the lord rent and required his permission to travel, move or even to marry in some cases!

But there was one place where the feudal system never really took hold: cities. Cities were generally independent of local lords. They had a class system, of course, but being centers of banking and commerce they were far more open to a "money talks, bullshit walks" mindset than their country cousins. Cities were also far more crowded than the country, so when a infectious disease hit town - like the plague - cities took an even harder population hit than the country. With the passing of the Black Death, labor would be in such great demand that many cities offered serfs freedom and cash to become city dwellers. Thousands took the cities up on their offers, only to find something even better waiting for them: a labor market so strapped for workers that they could dictate their wages to a degree.

The folks in the city were generally happy to give extra money to the former serfs, and that's because they were even richer than they were before. The death of a third of Europe's population meant that the survivors inherited tons of cash, valuables and land. And with that extra money, something happened to people that hadn't happened in a Europe in a long, long time: they suddenly had leisure time. Theatre, once performed outside by migrant actors, now had permanent homes with complex stages and sets. Music, once the realm of the Church or the Crown, became more available to the wealthy. Art, once confined to churches and palaces, began to find its way into the homes of merchants and the lesser nobility. Food, once eaten just for sustenance, became both an entertainment and an enjoyment. And commerce, once a largely local affair, expanded to include the entire globe, as merchants searched for ways to obtain silks, porcelain and spices directly from their source instead of from Arabic middlemen.

This new engine of art and commerce was powered by what would one day become the middle class. And as trade expanded, ever-increasing numbers of people were needed that were educated enough to keep a business's books or speak Hindi. Universities, once owned by the Church, began to pop up all over the place. And because they were no longer beholden to the Church for their existence, few topics were off-limits. Europeans began to see the world not as some mysterious place directly governed by God but as a physical universe with laws that could be deciphered by mankind. And this learning kicked off even more learning, as businesses searched for practical answers for their problems. A silver mine, for example, might have been troubled by constant flooding. Scholars tried to figure out why water could not be pumped more than 30 feet at a time from the mine, but this only generated dozens of new questions, the answers for which sometimes had practical use in other industries.

Trade brought Europeans into contact with Arabic translations of classic Greek and Roman writings, as well as Islamic science and math; these texts made their way back to Europe where they kicked off the Renaissance... which itself led to the Age of Reason. And no document from the Age of Reason speaks louder for the middle class than the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that "all men are created equal". Had there been no Black Death, serfs might have toiled in the fields for centuries before any meaningful change came their way. After all, many of the draconian measures put into place by the nobility as safety measures during the Black Death set off riots (such as the Jacquerie rebellion in France, the Ciompi rebellion in Italy and the Peasant Revolt in England); these riots were led by the "common folk" against their leaders and gave the peasants a political voice as well.

And finally, the new learning taking place and the risks associated with certain types of commercial ventures (like shipping) meant that Europeans were willing to pay someone handsomely for many tasks... which gave them the concept of social mobility. Unlike, say, China, where one was born into one class and stayed there for the rest of his life, in Europe one could take one thing (like gunpowder), add it to another thing (a bell) and make something new (a cannon) and then make a huge pile of money for doing so. That couldn't happen in China, so gunpowder was used there for ceremonial (and very limited military uses) for a thousand years before Europeans came across it and turned it into one of the most important human inventions ever. A similar tale happened with the magnetic compass: China developed them hundreds of years before Europeans found them... but then a European merchant noticed that something like a compass would come in handy on his ships. He took the idea back to Europe with him, where the "compass concept" was investigated and refined... and ships could now go even further and make even more money!

It's hard to imagine how the middle class might have developed at all... were it not for the Black Death.

*    *    *

Ghostboat is a British TV movie that aired a couple of months ago. It's about a Brit submarine that sank in WWII, only to resurface perfectly intact in the early 1980s. I won't waste my time telling you the rest of the story - the movie had an interesting premise, but the ending was a complete letdown - but I *did* want to tell you that I spotted a goof in the film and submitted it to IMDB. So here it is, in all its glory (it's the second one, about the gas mask bags). Nothing too exciting, I just wanted to share my first official IMDB submission with you.

Speaking of films, I just thought I'd help spread the good news: Warner is nearly complete with the transfer of Kenneth Branagh's kick-ass version of Hamlet to DVD. The film is currently in "scratch and dust removal" stage, which should probably be done at the end of this month. At that time, Warner will issue a release date. Awesome! Not only was this the last major movie filmed in 70mm, it's also the last VHS movie in my collection. It'll be GREAT to pop this in the DVD player one day... and get rid of those archaic VHS tapes!

A California company is asking the post office to allow regular postal mail to be delivered... using email addresses! That's right - a company called Inventerprise LLC wants us to be able stuff a letter into any envelope, write john@johndoe.com on the outside of the envelope, and have it arrive at John's physical location. It's not nearly as crazy an idea as it might initially sound: I have all of my friend's email addresses but only a handful of their physical addresses. If I wanted to mail out some party invitations, it'd be much easier to just be able to put their email addresses on the envelopes instead of having to call or email them for a traditional address. And the proposed system would be editable by end users, so college students coming home for the summer could keep getting mail addressed to student@statecollege.edu by going to a website and re-directing their mail to their parent's address. The only downsides to the system? Mail addressed with email addresses would be sent to a third party company that would match the email address with a physical one (thus delaying delivery); the postage for such letters would also be around three times the standard mail rates. Expensive? Yes, but handy for the rare times I'd need to use it.

Anyone who has ever gotten drunk and then gone on an online shopping spree will appreciate this "article" from The Onion.

Lastly, the Steelers got their Super Bowl XL rings on Sunday. Here's a picture of one:

06/08/2006: Anyone familiar with the IT industry is surely aware of the hundreds of "industry standards" that have come and gone over the years: USB, FireWire, PictBridge, 802.11g, Bluetooth, Ethernet, PCI, ISA, RS-232... the list goes on and on. Most of these standards are (were) well thought-out systems created by engineers working with designers and marketing departments. But that's not always the case. Industry standards are sometimes determined by available components or corporate warfare... or even one man's random decision! And you can find all three of those reasons in the chequered history of the phonograph record.

As you probably know, the first commercially viable recording and playback system was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. The system used a needle to cut grooves into a spinning wax cylinder. The only problem with the system was the the cylinder was turned by a hand crank. This meant that you could record something at 30 cranks per second (cps), while your neighbor might record something at 50cps, while the guy down the street might use 60cps. It wasn't long before Edison's engineers were asking him to create a "cranks per second" standard so that any recording would play back correctly on any machine. Edison found a machine and played with it for a while before setting on 80cps... "because it sounded right". No scientific testing, no focus groups, no careful study of the results... just Edison playing around with the machine for 15 minutes.

But the future of phonographs lay in discs, not in cylinders. A man named Emile Berliner invented the disc record the following year, and he too faced the problem of what standard to use. To be as compatible with Edison's system as possible, he decided to aim for the same "5 minutes of sound at 80cps" standard that Edison had settled on. But an ugly problem surfaced when it came time to manufacture an electrically-powered version of the turntables in 1925: the company had the option of using either 3600 RPM motors and 46:1 gears (which were cheap and available in quantity, but produced 78.26rpm instead of the standard 80rpm), or they could use custom-made motors and gears (which were expensive as all get-out but produced a true 80rpm). As you might have guessed, the company took the easy way out: the new standard was 78rpm, where it would stay for nearly 30 years.

Within a couple of years though, an even newer standard would be created. This standard combined improved recording capabilities with thinner grooves on slightly larger discs that were played back at 33.3rpm instead of 78rpm. Aside from improved fidelity, the system offered much lengthier playback times: around 30 minutes per side compared to 5 minutes per side with 78rpm records. But instead of rolling out the new system to the world, engineers kept it under wraps for a couple of decades. This is because of another invention that was really cutting in to record sales: radio. After all, why buy music when you can hear it for free? The powers that be in the record industry decided that keeping an outdated standard made more business sense than alienating customers by making them convert their collections to 33.3rpm. This became especially true after 1931, when RCA tried to release a hacked-together 33.3rpm system that was cheaply made and didn't work well. It was a complete disaster that not only made RCA look bad, but made 33.3rpm look bad too.

Columbia Records released a new version of the 33.3rpm system in 1948. This system was technologically much more reliable than RCA's 1933 system, and this time Columbia had two tricks up their sleeve: first of all, they offered to license their technology free of change to any company that wanted to use it. Secondly, the advertising campaign for the new system was aimed at classical music fans, who could now listen to an entire movement of a symphony without having to flip the disc over every five minutes. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony could now come on just 2 LP discs instead of the 15 discs the 78rpm versions shipped on. This system, at last, was a success. 33.3rpm records started appearing in record stores all over the country and reviews gushed over how great the new records sounded.

RCA wasn't having any of this, though. Their feelings were still hurt over their 1931 disaster, so they decided to adopt another standard - this time it was 45rpm records. 45rpm records weren't nearly as revolutionary as 33.3rpm records, in fact, they were simply an "upgrade" to the existing 78rpm standard. The new 45s contained the same amount of music as 78s (around 5 minutes), yet offered somewhat improved fidelity and the marginal benefit of being slightly more portable (7" across instead of 10" across). RCA's marketing department unleashed a slew of ads that claimed that 45rpm was the "optimum speed" for sound reproduction. In reality, RCA simply told their engineers to create a system that rotated the discs at any speed they liked, so long as it wasn't compatible with Columbia's 33.3rpm system. And to really drive the incompatibility point home, the engineers designed the spindle hole in the 45rpm records to be the size of a half dollar - as opposed to a hole the approximate diameter of a pencil, like the hole on 78rpm and 33.3rpm discs.

Let's pause and reflect, shall we? The year is 1948. You own a fair amount of records, all of which play at 78rpm. There's one new system out there that plays half-hour long discs at 33.3rpm, and another new system that plays five-minute long discs at 45rpm. Oh, and there are still tons of records being made at 78rpm. What do you do? You probably just stop buying records altogether - and that's what America did. From 1948 to 1950, record sales dropped a whopping 25 percent as the record-buying public waited for RCA and Columbia to duke it out for supremacy.

Unfortunately, neither side won. RCA was the first to blink; in 1950 they began offering 33.3rpm discs in Columbia's format. But rather than dump the 45, they started a huge advertising campaign touting the 7" (45rpm) record as the "preferred speed" for popular music. For some reason America bought that argument, and 33rpm records became the standard for classical and jazz music and 45rpm records became the standard for popular music. 45s became so popular, in fact, that Columbia began offering them in 1951.

So that's how the record industry came to be. Even today, 45rpm and 33.3rpm records are still being produced, albeit in tiny quantities. And the story of how these things came to be is an interesting look at how invention and industry works.

BONUS TRIVIA: The compact disc was developed jointly by Philips and Sony. According to legend, the capacity of compact discs was decided on by Sony vice-president Norio Ohgathe, who thought that Beethoven's 74 minute Ninth Symphony should be able to fit on a single disc. The truth to this long-standing geek legend is slightly more involved: although Sony and Philips were working as a team, teams from each company came up with two different circumferences for the discs. Philips was pushing for 11.5cm discs (around an hour of recording) and had even built a factory in Hanover, Germany for making such discs. Sony realized that allowing Philips to go ahead with the 11.5cm standard would give them a huge competitive advantage (Philips owned Polygram, at that time one of the world's largest record companies). Ohgathe then came up with the idea of the "Beethoven's Ninth fitting onto a single disc" story in order to push Philips into accepting 12cm discs... thus rendering their factory - and the advantage it provided - useless. The ploy worked.

*    *    *

I added a fix for Windows' "Scanner and Camera Wizard" to the Geek Stuff page, as well as cleaned up eight pages so that they'll look better in Firefox.

06/09/2006: Much like pornography, "one-hit wonders" are hard to define, yet people know them when they see them. In fact, even the definition itself is somewhat screwed up. A "one-hit wonder" is defined as "a band that has a single hit song in a nation's official music charts, then fades into obscurity forever". However, it doesn't always work like that. The Swedish band a-ha landed at #8 on VH1's list of 100 Greatest One-hit Wonders in 2002, even though the band actually had two Top 20 singles in 1985 ("Take On Me" reached #1 while "The Sun Always Shines on TV" reached #20). In the same vein, Great White are also considered one-hit wonders for their #5 hit "Once Bitten Twice Shy", even though "The Angel Song" also made it to Billboard's Top 40.

Geography also comes into play with one-hit wonders. A band can be hugely successful in one country but still be considered a one-hit wonder in another. The Cardigans had 10 top 40 singles in the UK, yet are still considered "one-hit wonders" in the US for their hit "Lovefool". Other geographically-hindered bands in the US include Nena, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Dexy's Midnight Runners and Crash Test Dummies. On the flip side, Brownsville Station and Alphaville are considered one-hit wonders in the UK, even though both had more than one hit single in the US.

And what about acts that are superstars in their own genres, but still get the one-hit wonder tag? Loreena McKennitt (Celtic), Uriah Heep (heavy metal) and Jars of Clay (Christian) are considered to be one-hit wonders by the mainstream, even though they're extremely successful in their respective genres. But on the other hand, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Roxy Music, Lou Reed, Phish, Janis Joplin, Rush, The Grateful Dead, Iggy Pop, Beck and Radiohead are not considered one-hit wonders, even though many of them in fact only had one hit single. How does that work exactly?

About the only thing people everywhere agree on is that novelty records make easy one-hit wonder targets. "Pac Man Fever" and "Disco Duck" are simply too easy targets not to get hit with the one-hit wonder tag.

Interesting one-hit wonder trivia:

Norman Greenbaum is a double one-hit wonder! He released a novelty song called "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago" under the name Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band in 1968. In 1970, he would get his second hit with the much more popular "Spirit In The Sky".

There's just something about "Spirit In The Sky": Doctor and The Medics' only hit was their 1986 cover of the song, while The Kumars (of the British TV show The Kumars At Number 42) had their one hit in the UK by covering that song in 2003 as well.

The Tom Hanks film That Thing You Do! was all about one-hit wonders. The name of the movie's fictitious band was "The Wonders", which was originally spelled "The Oneders" as if to drive the point home even more. But here's the funny thing: the movie's soundtrack was recorded under the name "The Wonders" by real-life one-hit wonder band Fountains of Wayne. Since the soundtrack made it #26 in the Billboard charts, it was the first time a real and a fictitious one-hit wonder made the charts.

80s pop star Limahl was also a double one-hit wonder in the US. His band Kajagoogoo had but one U.S. hit with "Too Shy"; a year later he had one hit as a solo artist with the theme song to the movie The NeverEnding Story.

Benny Mardones had one hit single ("Into The Night"), however the song hit the Billboard Top 20 twice: once in 1980 and again in 1990.

Lincoln, Nebraska duo Zager and Evans were one-hit wonders in 1969 with the #1 song "In the Year 2525". That feat came with two interesting distinctions: they're the only band to have their only single reach #1 after the band broke up and they're also the only band to have a #1 song and no other song in the charts for the rest of their careers. To make matters worse, they're the only act to do the second thing not once, but twice, as "In the Year 2525" also went to #1 in the UK.

And lastly, tip your hats to the true weirdoes of one-hit wonderland: acts that were one-hit wonders in both the US and the UK... but for different songs! There are at least four acts that have done so: Carole Bayer Sager: "Stronger Than Before" (US), "You're Moving Out Today" (UK); Mouth and Macneal: "How Do You Do" (US), "I See A Star" (UK); Art and Dotty Todd: "Chanson D'Amour" (US), "Broken Wings" (UK); Semisonic: "Closing Time" (US), "Secret Smile" (UK). Freaks!

*    *    *

Here's some more Friday fun: TV Squad has this piece about 13 of the most unloved characters in TV history (and yes, Scrappy Doo and Oliver from The Brady Bunch made the list); Yahoo! News has this disturbing story of a German man that apparently killed his wife with a sausage, as well as this story about an Englishman that wanted to fly from Los Angeles to Manchester, England only to end up in Manchester, New Hampshire instead. Oh, and Paul Wentz of the band Fall Out Boy is still taking nudie pictures of himself (look at how Morrissey turns away in the second picture!). Lastly for today, rumors are flying in the UK that The Office creator Ricky Gervais is considering making new episodes of the British version of the show now that the American one is such at hit... let's hope this moves past the "rumor stage"!

*    *    *

I updated the Top 10 Tunes list and also updated several more pages for Firefox compatibility.

06/12/2006: When you think of "identity theft", you probably think of people stealing your credit card number and buying things, or perhaps having your Social Security number stolen and credit cards opened in your name. It's a shameful business, but I've just gotta tip my hat to a gang in Japan, China and Taiwan that managed to steal an entire corporation's identity!

It seems that the gang was able to convince several factory owners in China and Taiwan that they were representatives of Japan's NEC Corporation back in 2004. The factories then proceeded to produce hundreds of thousands of counterfeit NEC products, which even NEC itself admitted were "of generally good quality". The operation was so successful that the gang even began producing their own line of products. In this case, factory engineers worked with gang members that were passing themselves off as "members of NEC's R&D team". The gang even went to the trouble to include manuals and warranty documentation with their pirated goods! I know, I know... they're criminals. They're bad. But damn - that's some initiative!

I added a Fun With Google Earth page to the My Writings page and added a new entry to the Geek Stuff page. Oh, and I also added this disgusting picture of Pete Burns' plastic surgery disaster to the Photo Gallery.

06/14/2006: First of all, I wanna send good karma and healing vibes to my favorite idiot quarterback - Ben Roethlisberger. He's apparently doing pretty well, and his injuries appear to be limited to his face - no knee problems, as reported a few days ago. In fact, Big Ben is doing so well that he might get out of the hospital by the end of this week! The bad news: a broken jaw means 3-4 weeks of "soft food", which means Ben might lose some weight that he'll have to put back on in a big ol' hurry if he wants to start this season. In any case, GET WELL SOON, BEN!

What the hell's the deal with Britney Spears? A couple of months ago I reported on Ms. Federline changing her baby on a table in a restaurant... now apparently she changed Sean Preston on the floor of a Victoria's Secret store, right next to the cash register! She apparently even had the nerve to get miffed when a VS employee refused to take the stinky diaper, nor allow her to put it in the waste basket underneath the registers herself. Man, lots of those celebrity sites call Brit a "hillbilly" and I just thought they were being mean... but it looks like they were right all along!

We expect this sort of silly behavior from Britney... but what about Jewel? It seems the folksy pop star that was once known for being squeaky clean has turned into a "Robitussin-swilling lush", according to this story at PageSix. She apparently tells Blender magazine that "[she] didn't start drinking until [she] was 30" and that "I grew up singing for alcoholics, and it never really seemed like alcohol fixed anything. I was afraid that it would get me. Around 30, I kind of realized that alcohol really does solve all your problems. Whoever said drinking doesn't help lied. You live and you learn." That doesn't seem like well-thought out logic to me, but whatever. The thought of Jewel high on Robitussin and stripping is actually kind of... hot. It almost makes you forget those horrible teeth, even!

It looks like Apple is getting some unwanted publicity regarding the factories that manufacture its iPod phenomenon. The company - which used both Ghandi and Che Guevara in its "Think Different" campaign - is accused of knowingly using "virtual slave labor" in the construction of the devices. Workers in China's "iPod City" are apparently paid as little as $40 per month for 15-hour shifts per day, live in factory-provided dormitories where outsiders are banned and spend as much as half of their wages on (company-provided) food and rent. Nice. But you know what? That's probably better than an agricultural life in China, and I'll bet you $10 that conditions there are about the same as any Asian factory. It's just that Apple supposedly sets such high standards for its supply chain. "Think Different", indeed.

Don't piss Mahlon Hector off. It seems that Mahlon was in one of those "resign before we fire you" situations with his employer, British retailing giant Marks and Spencer. The day he handed in his resignation, he also arranged for a package to be delivered to a colleague at the store in Leicester. Inside the package: one Brachypelma Smithi, also known as the Mexican red-kneed tarantula. The spider is more or less harmless except to those which are allergic to its venom, but the spider is often used in Hollywood movies for its terrifying appearance: a leg span of up to 10 inches, a hairy dark brown body with reddish-orange leg joints, and each leg ending with two claws which are used for climbing trees. I can hear poor Ms. Lisa screaming now! Check out the story here.

And lastly for today, let's tip our hats to the one British person that's not afraid to tell it like it is: Prince Philip! In honor of the Duke of Edinburgh's 85th birthday, authors Phil Dampier and Ashley Walton are releasing Duke of Hazard: The Wit and Wisdom of Prince Philip, a book that celebrates the Duke's legendary gaffes. Asked to pick his favorite, Dampier chose Kenya's independence ceremony in 1963 when Philip represented Britain; as the Union Jack was about to be hauled down, he turned to Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta and asked: "Are you sure you want to go through with this?" Another favorite: in 1967 Philip was asked if he would like to go to Moscow to help thaw out the Cold War. He replied "I would very much like to go to Russia - although the bastards murdered half my family." (The last surviving members of the Russian royal family were allegedly executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918; Philip is a direct descendant of Tsarina Alexandra.) And the gaffes keep coming: while touring Australia in 2002, Philip asked an Aborigine whether they "still threw spears at each other". On a trip to China in the 1980s, he warned British students that "you'll get slitty eyes if you stay too long." In 1995 he asked a Scottish driving instructor how he kept "the natives off the booze long enough to pass the (driving) test". Classy! But still, the British public might have a soft spot for Philip, as he often says what everyone else is thinking, but dare not say. Just a couple of weeks ago, he complained that the opening and closing ceremonies at the Olympics were "absolute bloody nuisances."

06/17/2006: Back in the 1920s and 1930s, millions of dollars were poured in to the study of bacteriophages - viruses that kill bacteria but are otherwise harmless to humans. Back then, diseases like cholera and dysentery were running rampant throughout the planet, and millions died from those two diseases alone. But then Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin in 1928, and Western medicine dropped bacteriophage study almost en masse to move into the new and sexy world of antibiotics.

Looking back on it now, that was a pretty boneheaded move. The overuse and misapplication of antibiotics has helped to hasten the day when bacteria become resistant to many (if not most) types of antibiotics. You see, not every single bacterium is affected equally by an antibiotic. Some antibiotics merely weaken a bacterium until the antibiotic ceases to be administered. Other bacterium might be completely immune to an antibiotic. Regardless, the important thing is that those bacteria most able to survive against antibiotics are the ones that survive and multiply. And given the short life of bacteria in general, natural selection can work it's magic in months or even days, instead of the centuries and millennia that humans tend to associate natural selection with. Staphylococcus aureus is not only one of the most common infections in hospitals, it's one of the hardiest too, having developed resistance to penicillin as early as 1947. MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is now considered to be "quite common" in British hospitals. And to show you what a problem its become, MRSA was the cause of 37% of all fatal cases of blood poisoning in the UK in 1999; less than a decade earlier, only 4% of blood poisoning deaths in the UK were caused by MRSA.

Thankfully though, not everyone ditched the study of bacteriophages. Antibiotic research was cutting edge stuff back in the 1930s and 1940s, and most of it was well outside the medical budget of the Soviet Union. Bacteriophages were relatively simple to study in comparison, and besides - the bacteriophages themselves are everywhere - in the soil, rivers... even your own gut! Joseph Stalin himself helped set up the Eliava Phage Research Institute in Tbilisi, (Soviet) Georgia in 1923. And although the West might have conquered Soviet ideas on many fronts, Western scientists have come to Tbilisi in droves, making this former Soviet satellite the forefront of a major revolution in medicine.

You see, bacteriophages are the natural enemy of the bacterium. Unlike antibiotics - which have to be carefully created or manipulated in labs - bacteriophages naturally mutate to keep up with their targets. If, for example, a city were hit with a particular strain of e. coli for which there was no known antibiotic cure, researchers would likely find a bacteriophage ready, willing and able to combat the bacteria in the pre-treated water at the local treatment plant. Indeed, scientists in Georgia are so well-versed with bacteria-bacteriophage behavior that they can usually come up with a cure in days, not weeks or months. Another plus with most phages is that each phage (usually) only attacks certain types of bacteria, leaving other types of bacteria alone. In this they work like a narrow spectrum antibiotic and not a broad spectrum antibiotic that kills the "helpful bacteria" that your body needs (see: yeast infection). Some phage types can even be combined into a "cocktail" if a broad spectrum medication is needed. Even better: Georgian doctors have tens of thousands of bacteriophages cataloged and ready to be replicated if need be.

So what's keeping bacteriophageamania from sweeping the West? Two nasty things, actually: the American patent system and the FDA.

Patents are the way pharmaceutical companies make money. They spend x amount of dollars developing a drug, then they patent it - which gives them the exclusive right to manufacture the drug for a specific amount of time, during which they can charge a premium for their product. If everything goes right, the company will make back what it spent in R&D... and hopefully even make a little profit too. Unfortunately, you can't easily patent a virus, and you certainly can't patent a naturally-occurring virus you've just pulled from sewer water. And unless all of the drug companies join together to jointly fund a huge study on the overall safety of bacteriophages, you'll probably never see a single company take the risk.

And then there's the FDA. As you might guess, bacteriophages are custom-engineered for each season (like flu shots), and they can also be engineered for specific individuals. For example, if you (and only you) come down with some rare tropical disease after touring the Amazon, Eliava can take a sample of the bacteria that's infecting you and locate a bacteriophage just for you. Which is great, but it flies in the face of the FDA's drug model, which insists that every drug be exactly the same and tested on a wide range of individuals for effectiveness. They also require that each drug undergo DNA sequencing and thorough clinical trials. As you might guess from my Amazon example, you'd almost certainly die before Eliava (or any other company) could a) save up the money for such testing; b) submit it for sequencing and testing; and c) round up enough people in the world that have your disease to test the phage on.

It's depressing and it's pointless, but that's what happens when the government gets involved. However,  there's nothing stopping anyone from traveling to Georgia to get a phage themselves. And in the face of ever-increasing antibiotic resistance, phages might one day be our only option. And government red tape hasn't prevented at least one company dedicated to phage research to open in the United States, and researchers at various American universities are looking at phage research using livestock instead of humans (which would come under the aegis of the USDA, not the FDA).

For more about bacteriophages, check out this Wikipedia article, this Slate article, and this transcript of a 1997 BBC Horizon program about phages.

*    *    *

How topical! It seems that researchers have found that "dirty" rats that live in sewers are actually healthier than rats born and raised in cushy antiseptic labs. This goes a long way towards proving that the "hygiene hypothesis" - the idea that Westerners are so clean that their immune systems have nothing to do but overreact to small irritants - is, in fact, real. Dr. William Parker, a Duke University professor of experimental surgery and one of the co-authors of the study - suggests that our immune systems "[are] like the person who lives in the perfect house and has all the food they want" that ends up "worrying about the little things like someone stepping on your flowers". With soaring rates of allergies - especially food allergies - and asthma cases in the West, this is at least somewhat welcome news, although in my opinion anyone anywhere can come up with "a study" that says anything.

Oooooops! It looks like the FBI has seized more than 20,000 CyberHome DVD players from a San Diego warehouse. It seems that CyberHome - a brand sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, Target and Wal-Mart (amongst others) totally skipped out on paying DVD manufacturing royalty licenses to Dutch electronics giant Philips. Since the items illegally carry the "DVD logo", they're considered counterfeit goods in California, where the penalty for dealing with more than 1,000 of said items is up to three years in prison and fines up to $500,000.

In the latest round of stupidity from America's record labels, the RIAA is now threatening legal action (via cease-and-desist letters) to hapless YouTube users that put up "personal" videos of things such as themselves dancing to "unlicensed" music. In case you missed it, YouTube is a site where just about anyone can upload just about any kind of video to the Internet. Although many of the clips on YouTube are original works released into the public domain by wannabe Spielbergs or unauthorized clips from broadcast TV, it seems that the majority of stuff on the site features giggling teenage girls dancing around one of their rooms with Jessica or Christina on in the background... or maybe it's some skater kids goofing off with music blasting in the background. Whatever. To "broadcast" such a video, one normally needs a music license from ASCAP or BMI. However, these clips are usually nothing more than silly home movies shared with friends. I don't know how the RIAA sleeps at night, especially since the pile of cash they normally sleep on is getting smaller and smaller by the day. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: alienating your customers by suing them for file sharing, infecting their computers with a rootkit, taking the Girl Scouts to court for singing songs around a campfire, creating online music stores with the intent for them to fail (so you can get out of electronic distribution) and hassling people for trading used CDs IS A BAD IDEA!

Those crazy Japanese will eat anything - even whaleburgers! And to absolutely no one's surprise Weekends With Maury and Connie has been canceled by MSNBC; the show simply wasn't pulling in the numbers, even though the 'net was airing it four times each weekend. And lastly, the folks at The Bastardly are all aflutter... about a picture... of Jessica Alba... sucking on a lollipop. Well, it's much ado about nothing, really, but I can't say I didn't enjoy looking at the picture myself.

*    *    *

Have you been to my British English Glossary page yet? If not, you really should, as I've put a lot of work into making it really good! Aside from a small glossary of British English words that might be unfamiliar to an American tourist, I've also added a section about weights and measures, British currency and (as of today) a fairly lengthy list of pronunciations for British place names. Do you know how to pronounce the name Happisburgh? I bet you don't!

I also added a piece on the Geek Stuff about Firefox keywords; they're really handy - you should absolutely check it out!

06/20/2006: Just about everyone in the English-speaking world - and probably the entire world - is familiar with the story of Jack The Ripper, the mysterious serial killer that haunted London's Whitechapel district in the second half of 1888. But many have never heard of another Jack that terrified the entire English nation decades before the Ripper. He was, in a way, much more frightening than Jack The Ripper... even if this Jack didn't kill anyone. This is because hundreds and hundreds of people saw him and were terrified by what they saw. Ladies and gentlemen... meet Spring Heeled Jack.

He was called Spring Heeled Jack because of his ability to effortlessly leap over walls that were 8, 10 or even 15 feet high. But that's not what scared people. It was his appearance - like that of a devil - that put the fear of God into people. He was tall and thin, with claws for hands, pointed ears and eyes that glowed red in the night. Some even said that he could breathe white or blue flames. The few that were unlucky enough to actually be touched by Spring Heeled Jack reported that his skin was ice cold.

Reports of Spring Heeled Jack exist from as early as 1817, but he didn't become a phenomenon until September of 1837, when reports of bizarre happenings hit the London press. A perfectly upstanding businessman reported that Jack had jumped over the tall wall of a cemetery and landed right in his path. Shortly thereafter, a group claimed that a man with similar features had attacked them, with one of the party having her coat ripped by the unknown assailant. Another of the party - a barmaid named Polly Adams - wasn't so lucky. She was found bloodied and unconscious in the same spot hours later with her blouse torn and deep scratches in her belly. A few weeks later, a girl named Mary Stevens was assaulted on Clapham Common by someone (or something) matching Jack's description, and in much the same fashion as Polly Adams had been. Jack returned the next day, this time by leaping from a wall to block the path of a moving horse carriage, causing it to crash. A few days later, Jack struck yet again... and this time he left physical evidence: police noted two footprints "around three inches deep" in the immediate area. This (of course) implies someone jumping from a great height. Upon further examination, one police officer noted "curious imprints" within the footprints which led him to believe that springs or some other gadget might have been involved. Sadly though, the concept of "forensics" hadn't developed yet, so casts were never made of the prints.

Hysteria about Spring Heeled Jack ran rampant in London, so much so that in January of 1838 Sir John Cowan, the Lord Mayor of London, held a public meeting on the issue. He was incredulous about the stories, but during the meeting at least one person related similar stories of the tall devilish man that could leap ten feet or more in the air. London's newspapers - hitherto strangely silent about the matter - ran stories about the Lord Mayor's meeting and the next day Cowan's office was flooded with letters about Jack sightings from citizens in Kensington, Hammersmith, Ealing, Stockwell, Brixton, Camberwell, Vauxhall, Lewisham and Blackheath. Even with all these letters, Cowan remained skeptical... until a close friend that he apparently trusted related yet another Spring Heeled Jack story. Cowan ordered police to search high and low for Jack, yet nothing was ever found. And Jack's attacks only became bolder and more frequent as a result.

After Jack attacked two girls - Lucy Scales and Jane Alsop - news of Spring Heeled Jack went national, and reports of a similar ghoul-like creature started popping up all over England. Interestingly, the frequency of Jack's "attacks" seemed to decrease as they happened over a greater area, leading some to wonder if Jack was a single person, although many copy cats were also suspected. No matter - Jack became a regular in newspapers and pulp fiction, even in plays.

But who - or what - was Jack? Some believe that Jack was no more than a myth, possibly based on an old folktale of a mental patient that claimed to be the devil and danced on rooftops. Others suspect Henry de La Poer Beresford, the Marquess of Waterford, who was allegedly publicly humiliated by a woman and a police officer and thought up Spring Heeled Jack as a way to "get back" at them both. Beresford had the time and money to pull it off. He also had several friends with mechanical knowledge who could have helped him design some shoes with springs in them. He even had an elaborate "W" as a personal crest - one that was quite similar to one spotted underneath Spring Heeled Jack's cloak during one of his attacks. Beresford, however, was in Ireland when Scales and Alsop were attacked, and Jack's attacks continued long after the Marquess' death in 1859. It is possible, though, that Beresford originated the character and others "filled in" for him. Since one of Jack's most famous sightings dates from 1877 - almost 40 years after the first reports in London - one assumes that more than one person was indeed involved. In any case, the mystery of Spring Heeled Jack continues to this day.

BONUS TRIVIA: The Marquess of Waterford is not only known for possibly being Spring Heeled Jack... he also gave the English language a phase that remains popular to this day. The Marquess was an avid hunter, and after one particularly successful hunt, the Marquess and his party had a few (OK, several) drinks. Whilst looking for more booze, they stumbled upon several cans of red paint... which they proceeded to splash all over the buildings on main street in Melton Mowbray... thus "painting the town red".

*    *    *

Kudos to the guys at Georgia Tech for hitting the tech headlines not once, but twice this week. Yesterday, the "Interactive and Intelligent Computing Division" at Tech's College of Computing displayed a prototype of a device that detects and disables digital cameras (hopefully to be used at sensitive government or corporate sites and not concerts). Then today comes news that IBM and GT have overclocked a computer chip to 500Ghz - by cooling it to -451F!

Still running Windows 98 or Windows ME? The death knell tolls. Microsoft has recently refused to release security updates to those operating systems due to both the extensive work that would be needed, as well as their previously-declared July 11, 2006 "end of life" date. Now there's news that Mozilla will stop supporting Windows 9x with the release of Firefox 3.0, scheduled for release some time in 2007. You might have noticed that it's getting harder and harder to find device drivers for Windows 9x, too. Take a hint and upgrade, OK? Here's Microsoft's release on the 9x EOL.

How the mighty have fallen - Steven Segal, once a Hollywood A-lister, is now reduced to signing autographs at the Big Apple Convention - NYC's "longest-running comic book, toy, art and sci-fi event." Worse still, he'll be sharing the bill with such has-beens as "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, Captain Lou Albano, actors Robert Vaughn and Matthew Wood... and "the guys who played Michael Myers in Halloween and Jason in Friday the 13th".

And lastly, a helpful hint: if you're going to kill your wife, make sure you don't get into an accident immediately thereafter. A man in Idaho killed his wife and decapitated her after death. He callously threw her head in the back of his pickup, then took off. He apparently then "aimed" for another car in an attempt to kill himself; unfortunately, he only ended up killing a woman and her child in the other car. The head of Theresa Time was thrown from the truck, leading police to Alofa Time's home, where the rest of the woman was found.

*    *    *

One quick announcement: apparently my rant about The Da Vinci Code has attracted some interest from people with their own axes to grind with Dan Brown. I'll post more about this as I get permission to do so!

06/23/2006: Poor Saddam Hussein... the guy went on a hunger strike to protest the killing of one of his lawyers... and skipped one whole meal before calling it off! That's dedication, folks! Man, even dictators are slack-asses these days! Not slackers: the Chinese government, which banned disco and other types of dance music in private rooms in nightclubs as a way to curb drug addiction. Oooooookkkaaaayyy. They're also going to start random drug testing of club employees too; such a policy here in the US would lead to the immediate overnight collapse of the bar and club scene, no? Perhaps someone should have drug tested Linda West, a British woman that claimed to have "accidentally" shot her husband whilst dancing to a Shania Twain song... while holding a shotgun. Ya know, I dance with firearms so often that I even have my favorite combinations. New Order and the Heckler & Koch P2000 work well together, as do new Depeche Mode and the Smith & Wesson 460V. And of course, you can't forget the natural combination of Ministry and an AK-47. (For what it's worth, West was convicted of the murder today). Sad news: Showtime sent news today that they've decided to cancel Huff, despite Blythe Danner winning an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress and nominations for Hank Azaria and Oliver Platt. It looks like the show's ratings were just too low; I'll have to look elsewhere for my Paget Brewster fix. Talk about your slow news days... on Monday, the Associated Press ran a story about how half of North Carolina's dog owners don't clean up their pet's waste. I wonder who funded that study? And lastly for today... some cool music stuff! Japanese kids in the 1970s must have had tons of fun with the Tomy Voice-Coder, a device that would record sounds to actual vinyl records. I know, I know... we've been able to make audio cassettes at home forever and burn CDs for nearly as long... but there's just something cool about cutting your own vinyl, no? Also, I recently stumbled across a cool article at Music Thing about "Tiny Music Makers" - the interesting back-stories about four different commercial jingles. Did you know, for example, that legendary Roxy Music alum and U2 producer Brian Eno created "The Microsoft Sound" for Windows 95? Further, did you know that the original paperwork from Eno's agency said that "'[Microsoft] want[ed] a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,' this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said 'and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.'". How funny!

*    *    *

Keep your eyes on this site! As I hinted at the other day, my anti-Da Vinci Code rant has attracted the attention of some folks that have serious problems with Dan Brown's book. I was contacted via email this week by Jack Dunn, the author of The Vatican Boys: A Novel About Church Corruption (Amazon link), who feels that Brown did a right-ripoff of his book. Further, Dunn is now in talks with Lewis Perdue about suing Brown jointly (Perdue feels that Brown ripped off major parts of his book, Daughter of God. Perdue's case against Brown is the subject of a lengthy article in this month's Vanity Fair magazine). Interestingly, both authors are working jointly to get Holy Blood, Holy Grail author Henry Lincoln on their side too.

In any case, I hope to get in touch with Dunn by phone early next week and have either a printed transcript of the call (or better yet, a podcast). However, I just can't pull an interview out of nowhere... I've gotta set up the equipment and figure out which questions to ask, so gimme a few days to get everything together, OK? In the meantime, check out this article about Jack Dunn's story from catholic.org.

06/30/2006: Medical science might be on the verge of a truly amazing discovery. For decades, it's been thought that the only organ responsible for human memory is the brain. And while it's true that the lion's share of memories and preferences are indeed kept in the brain, it turns out that the brain might not be the only organ where such things are kept.

It all began when two American doctors - working separately on either coast - noticed something odd about heart transplant patients. Once the patients had recovered, their personalities started to undergo subtle changes. For example, a woman named Claire Sylvia started drinking beer and eating green peppers and chicken nuggets, even though she'd never enjoyed doing so before. Bill Wohl, a middle aged man from Phoenix, was a dedicated businessman that rarely - if ever - exercised before his heart transplant; as soon as he was healthy enough to do so, he stopped working so much and took up extreme sports. An Englishman named Jim that had barely graduated from school and led the decidedly non-academic life of a truck driver suddenly began writing poetry. An unnamed woman that hated violence so much that she'd even leave the room when her husband watched football started watching football and swearing like a sailor while doing so. Another unnamed person - this time a 47 year-old male - suddenly developed a fascination with classical music, and could even hum obscure classical pieces he'd never heard before.

All of these changes could be chalked up to any number of things. The immunosuppressant drugs that transplant patients require to keep their bodies from rejecting their new hearts have been known to cause profound changes in people's personalities. The sheer stress of the transplant itself could be one of those "life altering" events that are so profound that it causes people to do new and different things. Perhaps the fear of death causes many people to be more introspective, resulting in some people "living life to the fullest" or others to turn inside and write poetry.

Or perhaps - just perhaps - the heart contains the same types of neurons that the brain does, and both the heart and the mind are connected in some kind of "loop". So when a heart is taken from one person and given to another, the newly changed "loop" causes people to subtly change.

Sound silly? Impossible? What if I were to tell you that Claire Sylvia's donor was a man named Tim that loved eating green peppers and chicken nuggets. And what if I were to tell you that Bill Wohl's donor was a Hollywood stuntman that loved extreme sports like rock climbing and skydiving? And what about Englishman Jim, whose donor was a writer? The donor of the woman that hated football? He was a boxer. And the donor of the man that suddenly developed a taste for classical music? He was a 17 year-old violinist that was stuck by a car after practice one day.

These results are amazing, but not typical. The two American doctors mentioned at the beginning of this article - psychoneuroimmunologist Dr. Paul Pearsall and Dr. Gary Schwartz (professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona and former director of the Yale University Psychophysiology Center) - only found evidence of "memory transfer" in 10 out of 70 transplant patients. But still - if it can be proven, then it's simply amazing.

If you're interested in reading more about this, check out this book by Paul Pearsall, this book by Gary Schwartz and\or this book by Claire Sylvia, about the changes she underwent as a result of her transplant.

*    *    *

Are you a fan of Kraftwerk and have (at least) $5300 to spare? Then hop on over to this auction on eBay and bid on "the original one-of-a-kind prototype vocoder Kraftwerk... used to record 'Ananas Symphonie' and 'Kristallo' on their 1973 release Ralf & Florian" and was also used to record the intro for Autobahn. AWESOME! Thanks to Engadget for the tip.

And corporate piracy marches on... Virgin France was fined €600,000 (around $766,625) for "illegally downloading Madonna's 'Hung Up' for resale on its site". It seems that Virgin decided to ignore an exclusivity agreement that had been signed by Warner Music France, France Telecom and Orange. The agreement said that France Telecom would have a one-week exclusive on distributing the song in France, but Virgin simply purchased the track from France Telecom, stripped the track of its DRM, repackaged it and sold it on Virgin France's website. Interestingly, Virgin France's defense was that it had "broken the exclusive agreement in the interest of consumers". Apparently some in Europe feel that exclusive release deals - like Best Buy having first dibs on Rolling Stones CDs here in the US - "limit consumer access to music". Well, I reckon I agree with that... but Virgin's solution is not the way to go about remedying the situation, now is it?

Some people really like watching the World Cup - especially one Chinese man that was watching a match when his house caught fire. The man didn't attempt to locate his wife or baby, or even save important papers or family photos - he simply put the TV under his arm, walked outside and started looking for an electrical outlet for the TV. The Chinese are apparently nuts about the World Cup: in the linked article you'll find stories about the IT guy that turned down a raise and quit his job to stay home and watch the Cup uninterrupted. And a cell phone thief was released by police when the victim refused to come forward... because a match was about to start! Ah, those crazy football fans!

Piper Perabo might be as cute as a button, but she apparently can't spell. Although she graduated summa cum laude from Ohio University in 1998, she turned down a friend's suggestion that she share her horticultural knowledge with New Yorkers... because she says she can't spell. For the record, the "horticultural knowledge" in question was that "the rooftops of New York [City] actually have the same ecosystems as the American prairies because it is so dry, windy and hot" and that "the best flowers" to plant on said rooftops "would be poppies and vines and common prairie wildflowers".

Lastly for today... watch out, Tony Blair! For the first time in his 12-year run as prime minister, polls show that his opposition is more popular than he is! According to this piece on Yahoo! News, "pollsters YouGov, in a survey commissioned by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, found 30 percent of Britons thought new Conservative Party leader David Cameron would make the best prime minister, against 28 percent who preferred Blair". And if a general election were held today, "39 percent of respondents would vote Conservative.... against 33 percent who would vote Labour". To make it even worse for Blair, Labour lost a valued seat in Blaenau Gwent (Wales) and trailed in a London area election in forth place, behind even the UK Independence Party. It's not all good news for the Tories though: in the Conservative stronghold of Bromley, their margin of victory slipped from more than 13,000 in the last election to around 600 in the current one, suggesting Cameron's centrist message is not going down well with all Conservative supporters - even though Bromley has only sent Tories to the House of Commons since 1945.

07/05/2006: When I was a child, WTBS (a.k.a. TBS, the "Superstation") was known as WTCG. At the time, WTCG was a small, unimportant UHF station in Atlanta that was infamous for running old black & white B-movies and reruns of ancient TV shows like Petticoat Junction, Felix The Cat and Mighty Mouse. Even though America had firmly moved in to the color TV era by this point, it sometimes seemed as if the only color you'd ever see on WTCG were the commercials or the occasional color episode of The Beverly Hillbillies!

One of the shows that WTCG ran religiously was the original Superman TV show - the one from the 1950s starring George Reeves. It was one of my favorite shows as a wee child, and I'd beg my mom to rush home from kindergarten so I wouldn't miss a minute of Reeves dishing out truth, justice and the American Way. It's ironic (and sad) then, that Reeves would be denied all of those things when it came to his own life.

George Reeves was born in 1914 in Woolstock, Iowa. His first film appearance was 1939's Ride, Cowboy, Ride. Reeves would go on to become a somewhat successful "bit part" actor; he ended up being one of Vivian Leigh's first suitors in the opening scene of Gone With The Wind. But by the 1950s, Reeves star had fallen, and he was reduced to taking the occasional part on television.

In 1951, Reeves was approached about doing a TV movie based on the Superman character. Reeves absolutely needed the money at this point, but back in those days TV was considered to be strictly "b-list"... so it wasn't unusual that Reeves thought long and hard about taking the role, as he didn't want to ruin his "real" career in movies for a quick paycheck in TV. He eventually relented, however, and production began on Superman and the Mole-Men - a made for TV movie that ended up being so popular that it was split into two one-hour programs called Superman and the Strange People - which would be the "pilot episodes" of the Superman TV show.

Reeves would go on to film 100 additional episodes as the Man of Steel, and would transform himself into one of America's favorite actors and one of TV's first role models. Reeves was often forced to make public appearances as Superman, and he found this to be humiliating... especially when children tried to challenge his assumed "superhuman" powers. One child even brought a loaded handgun to one of his appearances... to test Reeve's supposed "bullet deflecting" powers! Nevertheless, Reeves took his responsibility as a role model so seriously that he quit smoking and was rarely (if ever) seen in public with his girlfriends.

Superman ended its run in 1957, and Reeves was horrified to find that he had been typecast as Superman. No matter how many agents, producers or friends he called, no one wanted to see Reeves as anyone but Superman. A good friend of his at Disney got him a role in what would be his last film, Westward Ho The Wagons. In that film, Reeves wore a beard, presumably because the director didn't want people to look at Reeves and think "Superman". In any case, Reeves became despondent over the typecasting, and on June 16, 1959 he went to his bedroom after a long night of drinking with friends and shot himself.

Or so the story goes. The police arrived and queried all of the guests that remained at Reeves' home, and since they all agreed that it could only have been suicide, the police accepted their story. The only problem is, a lot of the facts around Reeves' "suicide" just don't add up:

• There were no fingerprints on the gun. Presumably, Reeves would have been dead and couldn't have wiped the gun himself, nor was he wearing gloves. And if it was, in fact, a suicide, why would one of the guests wipe the gun?

• The spent shell casing was found underneath Reeves. Contrary to what you see in the movies, when people are shot they simply fall down exactly where they stood. It's sometimes described as "falling like a sack of potatoes". Since Reeves was found in his bed, the only simple scenario where the the casing could have ended up underneath him would be if Reeves had stood at the foot of his bed with his back to the bed, then pulled the trigger whilst falling back onto the bed. Could he have done that? Sure. Could he have shot himself in some other way so that the casing ended up there? Sure... but it's highly unlikely.

• The gun was found at Reeves' feet. Had Reeves shot himself whilst standing up (as in the scenario above), the gun would have been found on the floor, not on the bed at Reeves' feet. In any other scenario, the gun would have been in Reeves' hands, or on the bed much closer to his head.

• There were no powder burns on Reeves' head. When someone puts a gun to their head and pulls the trigger, some of the burning gunpowder always burns a unique pattern around the wound. None was found on Reeves' head, which indicates that the gun was at least 18 inches (or more) away from Reeves's head when the trigger was pulled. Again, Reeves could have held the gun 18 inches away from his head and done the deed, but this seems unlikely. In fact, it's so unlikely that the lack of powder burns near a "self inflicted" wound is almost always a sign of foul play for modern coroners.

• There were multiple bullet holes in the walls. Bullet holes were found in the walls of the bedroom and the living room. It would have been impossible for Reeves to fire more than one bullet, and it have been awfully strange for bullet holes from any previous "incidents" to have not been covered up by this time. Incredibly, this angle was not explored at all by the police.

• Reeves had cut down his drinking. Reeves was well-known as a "party guy" in Hollywood circles, especially in his younger days. But by the time of his death he had trimmed his drinking to the occasional social drink. Of course, people that have never had a drink in their lives also kill themselves, so a lack of alcohol doesn't necessarily mean anything. But - if anything - his cleaning himself up would seem to point in the opposite direction: that Reeves's life was coming together, not falling apart.

• Reeves was working again. Reeves had just signed a contract to do two additional seasons of Superman, and had also had just signed a five-picture deal with Paramount Studios (one of the roles was to play the lead detective in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho). He was even scheduled to fight boxer Archie Moore the next day (Reeves had a successful wrestling career in the 1940s). It seems odd then that Reeves would have killed himself over a "lack of roles" given that he had plenty of work coming up.

• Reeves was getting married in three days. Reeves was supposed to marry his girlfriend Lenore Lemmon on June 19th - three days before his "suicide". It seems odd that he would have killed himself just before his wedding!

• Police weren't called for at least 40 minutes after the death. It's entirely possible that Lemmon and the guests simply needed some time to sober up before calling the police. But with all of the other things listed above, it just seems strange that the police weren't called immediately.

So - the obvious question is: if Reeves didn't kill himself... who killed Reeves? There seem to be two possibilities: Lenore Lemmon and Toni Mannix.

Reeves and Lemmon apparently had a passionate relationship. They were known to argue heatedly in public, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that Reeves and Lemmon argued that night so intensely that Lemmon pulled a gun and shot him. Lemmon herself claimed to be the cause of the bullet holes throughout the house, as she had been "fooling around with" the gun earlier that evening. So she could have killed Reeves in a fit of passion. But had she done so, why would all of the guests go along with her story about Reeves committing suicide? And if it was premeditated, why would she have killed Reeves at that point? He hadn't gotten around to changing his will yet, so Lemmon got nothing from his death.

And then there's Toni Mannix. Toni was the wife of Eddie Mannix - the vice president of MGM and someone with alleged ties to the mob. Toni and Reeves had been having an affair for years, and Reeves attempted to break it off as his relationship with Lemmon blossomed. But Toni wouldn't leave him alone. In fact, Toni's obsession with Reeves got so bad that at one point Reeves went to an attorney to see if he could get a restraining order against her. Whether Reeves was "murdered" by Toni in an "if I can't have him, no one can" gesture or whether the deed was done by jealous husband Eddie - who was accused of murdering his first wife Beatrice in a staged car crash in 1937 - is unknown. Some who have studied the last days of Reeves' life wonder if a car crash he suffered not long before his death wasn't an accident at all, but rather was Eddie's handiwork. And if Reeves was indeed murdered by Eddie or Toni (or an associate), perhaps it was the mob ties that scared Reeves' guests into silence.

Sadly, we'll never know. There was never a definitive list of the guests at Reeves' house that evening, and just about everyone else that can verifiably be traced to this "case" has died.

07/11/2006: Are you reading this article at work? Via a public Wi-Fi hotspot at a coffee shop or airport? Anywhere in public? If so, look around you. You'll probably see at least one door with one of those standard illuminated EXIT signs above it. You might notice that the exit door has a brightly colored handle, so as to be easy to see in case of a smoky fire. You might also have noticed that just about every door leading to the outside in a public building - be it an office, a church, a shopping mall or a school - pushes out from the inside, rather than pulls in, so that in case of emergency the people inside can exit the building as quickly as possible. You might have even noticed that buildings that have revolving doors always have at least one "normal" door next to the exit, so that if there's some emergency people aren't stuck waiting to walk through the revolving door.

All of these fire\emergency safety precautions might seem like common sense today. But it took one of the greatest tragedies in American history for such changes to become required by law. That tragedy was the Cocoanut Grove Fire of 1942.

The Cocoanut Grove nightclub was the place to be in early WWII-era Boston. The club had a maximum official occupancy of 460, but the club was so popular that it often had two or three times that amount inside. And it's not difficult to see why everyone would want in: the club was a virtual paradise inside, a lush, tropical-themed club lined with artificial palm trees and cloth coverings on the walls and ceilings. The club even had a retractable roof that was opened in the summer months so that the club's patrons - a lot of them soldiers and sailors on their last big fling before setting off to fight in Europe - could dance under the stars. The club had a main floor which had your basic bar and dance floor setup, a dining room upstairs, and an intimate lounge downstairs. If a GI played his cards right, he could spend an entire evening there: after a nice dinner upstairs, he could go downstairs for drinks and dancing on the main floor, and then go down to one of the dark corners of the lounge for a make-out session if he'd been lucky.

The night of November 28th began much like any other at the Cocoanut Grove. Over 1,000 people were inside around 10pm. Mickey Alpert was about to kick off his group's second show of the evening in the dining room. People were drinking, talking and carousing. Downstairs, in the Melody Lounge, a soldier unscrewed a light bulb from its fixture, so as to get some privacy whilst making out with his date. The couple left shortly thereafter, and a bartender instructed Stanley Tomaszewski - a 16 year-old busboy - to put the bulb back in. Tomaszewski went to the sofa and attempted to screw the bulb back in. The bulb must have been quite loose because the bulb fell off into Tomaszewski's hand. Try as he might, he just couldn't find the socket in the dark, so he lit a match to light up the area. He found the socket, screwed in the bulb, and walked away.

Almost immediately, witnesses reported seeing flames break out amongst the palm fronds. It appears that the bartenders and staff made a heroic attempt to put out the fire with ice buckets full of water, but the flames moved too quickly, feeding on the flimsy paper palm trees and the satin wall coverings. The fire seemed to almost have a mind of its own, and a malevolent mind at that. It raced up the stairs, turned into a massive fireball and made its way across the main dance floor. From there it moved into one of the side bars, then another, then raced up the stairs to the dining room. Within minutes, the entire block-long nightclub was on fire.

As you might guess, panic quickly ensued amongst the people inside the club. Many attempted to leave via the club's main door - a revolving door. People began pushing and shoving, so much so that bodies fell into the door and jammed it shut. In fact, when Boston firefighters arrived they had to remove the door altogether to get inside the club. There were emergency exits, of course, but most were either locked or welded shut to prevent people from skipping out on their tabs. Other doors were available, but these opened inwards from the outside, and the sheer crush of people against the doors kept them closed. There was even a large plate glass window that could have been used to escape, had it not been boarded up at the time.

All in all, 492 people died in the fire and hundreds more were injured. Popular cowboy actor Buck Jones was one of the dead, as were a couple that had been married that same day. A sailor named Clifford Johnson went back into the building at least four times searching for his girlfriend. He developed third-degree burns over 50% of his body as a result of his chivalry; little did he know that she had already escaped without harm. The Boston College football team - nationally known and undefeated so far that season - were scheduled to hold a victory party at the Cocoanut Grove that evening; a loss that afternoon to Holy Cross led the team to cancel it. All in all, the Cocoanut Grove fire was a living nightmare. So many people had rushed the jammed front door that many began dying from smoke inhalation as soon as they got to the back of the "line" (such as it was). The pile of bodies was said to extend nine feet from the revolving door.

But some good came of the fire. Most states quickly adopted new rules for nightclubs, theatres and other public places as a result of the disaster. One of those rules included the standard EXIT signs you see today. Another was the adoption of doors that open outwards from the inside; this rule was especially crucial, as Boston's fire officials estimated that 300 additional people could have survived the fire had the Cocoanut Grove had such doors. Yet another was a rule that places having revolving doors now had to either have a standard door next to the revolving one, or to install revolving doors with "wings" that would quickly fold flat and create a exit in case of emergency. Most states also overhauled their fire inspection procedures and gave their inspectors more teeth to fine owners of failing buildings. Doctors also learned a great deal from the fire, including how to treat inhalation injuries, the use of topical antibiotics on burns, and the metabolic consequences of thermal injury - all of them standard procedures in hospitals to this day.

Like the sinking of the Titanic or the Hindenburg explosion, the Cocoanut Grove fire has long held a grim fascination for some. And for years people wondered how the fire moved so quickly and explosively. Certainly all of the cheap paper decorations helped the fire along, as did the flammable fabric lining the ceiling and the walls. But neither of those could have created the huge fireball that swept the dance floor... What could have caused it? The findings of an exhaustive investigation carried out in 1997 pointed to methyl chloride - an extremely flammable gas that was used as a refrigerant at the time. Maintenance records indicated that one of the coolers in the lounge was leaking coolant, so once the small frond fire hit the gas, a disaster was guaranteed.  

*    *    *

Speaking of fires, the guys at Georgia Tech are on fire lately! I recently posted about two of their latest inventions - a device that detects and disables digital cameras and a computer overclocked to 500Ghz. But then there was news last week about their newest invention: a military-grade hard drive wiper called Guard Dog that uses no electricity and can wipe hard drives, VHS tapes, DAT tapes, ZIP drives, and just about any other type of magnetic media completely clean. The only way surer than this? Drop it in molten metal. Go GT!

It's a little late for World Cup news, but I just wanted to mention that police in Berlin have tracked down and arrested two mean-spirited pranksters that went around Germany's capital city challenging hapless visitors to try and kick a soccer ball... that was filled with concrete! The pranks caused several injuries, and then men were taken in on a variety of counts.

Got a million bucks burning a whole in your pocket? If so, you can get the latest in fashionable beds - specifically, you can get a bed designed by Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars that uses magnets to float in the air. Seriously. The only thing keeping this bed in place are four thin tethers that keep the bed anchored in the same spot... other than that, you're floating. If a million is too much, you can buy a 1/5 sized model - good as a dog or cat bed, one assumes - for a mere $146,000.

Lastly for today... how about some crappy corporate action! National Semiconductor made headlines last month when it gave each of its 8,500 employees a 30GB iPod as a bonus for having the best year in company history. But what one hand giveth, another can taketh away: 35 people were recently laid off from one of the company's plants, and all were asked to turn in their iPods before leaving the building. Those that refused (or didn't have their players handy) faced the indignity of having the retail value of the iPod deducted from their final paychecks. Classy move, National Semi!

*    *    *

Check out the website updates: I added an optical illusion to the site as well as a new section on the front page and two new tips to the Geek Stuff page!

07/19/2006: IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR RSS USERS: Jeez - what a pain in the ass! jimcofer.com's most faithful reader emailed me the other day to ask why my RSS feed hadn't been updated since April 11th of this year. This was, of course, news to me. The RSS feed has been working perfectly in NewsGator, Google Reader and Firefox (well, sort of: Firefox's implementation isn't a true "RSS reader" per se, more of a "URL collector". Were I to use WordPress or some system where each entry into this news box got a unique URL, then Firefox would work. Since most of my RSS links point back to this page, then it's kind of useless).

So... I went to track down the problem. The new Internet Explorer 7.0 (Beta 3) rendered the feed somewhat successfully (all articles there, but without any HTML tags), but once you subscribed to a feed IE would only download the first two articles. I then set up an account with Feedburner, thinking that might somehow help (it didn't, and Feedburner's page looked just like IE: all of the articles were there, but all HTML had been stripped, so each article was one huge paragraph without italics or boldface and no hyperlinks).

So now I've broken down and gotten an RSS Editor. After doing it by myself with Notepad (actually, Notepad++) all this time, I'm now reduced to using someone else's work! I HATE that! But oh well... anyway, the old feed couldn't be salvaged, so I've created a new one:

http://www.jimcofer.com/feed.rss

or

http://feeds.feedburner.com/jimcofer

I'd prefer it if you used the Feedburner link - that's where the RSS logo (left) points to... but in the end I guess that it doesn't really matter. All I know is that the RSS feed now looks the same in NewsGator, IE, Google Reader and a couple of other readers... so please change the links in your RSS readers as necessary.

07/20/2006: I've got a WHOLE BUNCH of food related news for today:

First of all, is there no end to the number of places that advertisers will put their damn ads? It appears that CBS will put ads on the shells of 35 million eggs in the coming weeks. You may have noticed that Eggland's Best eggs have an "M&M"-style "EB" stamp on them. Well, the CBS ads will be similar, only they'll take up one whole "side" of the egg. Worse yet, the ads will be "egg themed", such as "CBS Mondays: Shelling Out Laughs", "CSI: Crack the Case on CBS", and "Shark: Hard-Boiled Drama". Ummmm... yeah.

It may sound obvious to most of us, but a recent study seems to prove that larger portions make people eat more. But before you say "well, duh!", the study actually found that people would eat more if given a larger portion... even if the food was bad! In the study, certain people were given portions of freshly popped popcorn and others were given 2 week old popcorn; the "freshly popped" crowd ate 43% more if given a larger container of the stuff, while the people with the dated kernels still ate 34% more... even though it was stale! Gross!

Did you know that Baker's Chocolate is one of the oldest food brands in the Unites States, dating back to 1780? Did you also know that Baker's German Chocolate has nothing whatsoever to do with Germany, but was named after its inventor (a dude named Sam German)? Did you also know that German Chocolate Cake - one of my all-time favorites - was named after the chocolate product (which was named after its inventor) and not the country? Get your learn on about Baker's Chocolate with this interesting (yet brief) article at Slashfood. Oh, and speaking of chocolate, it appears that food scientists in Nigeria have finally succeeded where the highly-paid scientists at Hershey, Cadbury and Mars failed: the Nigerians have created a type of chocolate that doesn't melt in high temperatures. I mention this because I have vivid memories of my dad bringing home these horrible samples of "melt-proof" chocolate bars the Hershey rep would leave him. Every couple of years they'd try some new formula, and every time it still sucked. Here's hoping the Nigerians  have got it right!

I know it's a bit dated at this point, but I think it's funny that beer baron Peter Coors lost his license last week after being charged with "driving while impaired" in his home state of Colorado. Apparently Coors ran a stop sign and was stopped. His initial BAC reading was .073, but at a second test, the reading crept up to .088. Because Coors is a first-time offender and had a low BAC reading, he'll be charged with the lesser charge of "driving while impaired" instead of "driving under the influence". And since I'm on the subject of alcohol, a new pub claiming to be "London's Smallest" will open next month in the always-awesome Borough Market. The pub - to be christened The Rake - will seat approximately 44 people in its 91 square feet. The entire pub is only 13' x 7'!

Remember last month when I reported on a German man that killed his wife with a sausage? A Connecticut man was recently charged with second-degree assault after poking his wife's eye out with a carrot!

Rob Thomas has promised cleaner and more compact storylines for the upcoming season of Veronica Mars. Which is good, especially since The CW has only ordered a half-season of Mars at this point. I hope, hope, hope Rob hits it out of the park this year, 'cos I'd hate for Veronica Mars to get canceled.

And lastly for today, a bill has been brought before Congress to eliminate the penny. Of course, this is hardly the first time some Congresscritter has tried to kill the penny, but this time it's different: for the first time, it actually costs more than a penny to make one. In fact, it costs the United States Mint 1.4¢ to make each 1¢ coin. Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) introduced a bill this past Tuesday that would phase out the coin by rounding all transactions up or down to the nearest nickel, or 5 cents. I'm actually all for it, myself.

07/25/2006: I've always done my own thing when it comes to music. Back in 7th grade - when my classmates were listening to Def Leppard or Rick Springfield - I was digging on Duran Duran and Madness. The next year my family moved across the county to Duluth, where I'd get daily beatings for liking "faggot bands" like U2... who, of course, went on to become the biggest band in the whole world. A few years later, I introduced my high school to the delights of 4AD Records, with their stable of bands like Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance. When I tired of that spiel, I moved on to "local" bands like R.E.M. - back when they were still considered a "local band".

You might have noticed that many of the bands that I mentioned just now went on to become pretty big. I take no credit for that, of course, but I *did* manage to stay ahead of the curve for a long time as far as music went. I eschewed what was on commercial radio for college radio stations like Album 88 and WREK. I took a chance on bands I'd read about in obscure (for the US) magazines like Melody Maker, NME, Trouser Press, and Option. Eventually, I was even able to make rough guesses on a band's sound based solely on their record label, the album's producer, or some of the session musicians - just as many film fans can make pretty good guesses about films based on who's producing, directing, or controlling the cameras.

Although I did a magnificent job of "staying ahead of the curve" when I was a teenager, it didn't always work out that way as I got older. I *hated* grunge, and took refuge in classical music for a couple of years in college. A rediscovery of Peter Gabriel's Passion album kicked off a brief foray into "World music". Instead of being ahead of some mythical curve, I now drifted from band to band or genre to genre, regardless of how late to the party I was.

And that's how I met Alizée. Someone on the Ars Technica forums started yet another one of those dreaded "post your animated GIF!" threads. One of the pictures was the infamous "Alizée dancing" picture (click here if you're the only person on earth that hasn't seen that picture). Anyway, I became curious as to just who this chick was, so I looked her up on Wikipedia. I found out that her full name is Alizée Jacotey, that she was born on August 21, 1984 in Ajaccio, Corsica - the same city as Napoleon Bonaparte! - and that she's considered to be "France's answer to Britney Spears".

I next moved over to Google Video to see if any videos were available. Sure enough, several versions of some live performance of her hit "J'en Ai Marre" were available (the best quality one is here). This video is (obviously) the source of the animated GIF... and might I just say that the girl is simply... breathtaking! But that's not all... I must confess to you one of my deepest, darkest secrets. I actually like her music. Yes, I said it. I like her French pop music. If you know me, you probably know that I enjoy all sorts of music that straight men aren't supposed to like. Madonna? Check! Bananarama? Check! The Go Gos? Check! And now I suppose that you can add Alizée to that list.

Take her first single, a little tune called "Moi... Lolita" (or "Me... Lolita" in English). Kind of like the upcoming summer blockbuster Snakes On A Plane, the title is all you need to know, really. And it's perfectly crafted pop music - light as a feather, fluffy as a croissant, and empty as a beignet inside... the kind of music that makes the elitist writers at Rolling Stone lament the passing of John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, and other makers of "real music". The Manchester branch of the BBC famously reviewed "Moi... Lolita" and gave it a zero on its 1-10 scale. Giving a song a zero on a 1-10 scale can only mean one of two things: either the music is horrible (unlikely, as the song was a hit across Europe), or it means that the Beeb's music reviewers are pissed that a 17 year-old French girl is making hit records, whilst they - unrecognized music geniuses that they (think they) are - are having to sit on the sidelines and write about music... instead of touring and getting it on... with 17 year-old French girls. To these "journalists", music can only be good if it's complex and thought-provoking. Which is fine... I have nothing against quality musicianship or meaningful lyrics. But it's not the only thing that matters. What makes Alizée's music so great is that it grabs you by the collar and gets stuck in your head. I flat-out dare you to listen to "Moi... Lolita" and not play it over and over and over again of your own volition. The same goes for "J'en Ai Marre". It's just damn quality pop music... even if it *is* French.

In the past couple of days, I've wandered over to AllofMp3.com and purchased both of Alizée's albums - Gourmandises and Mes Courants Électriques - and you know what? I like 'em, OK? I don't care. It's funny though... instead of simply saying "I like Alizée", I've used over 900 words to justify myself. Why do I feel the need to do that? She's a pretty little French girl that makes good pop music... yet why do I feel like it's such a guilty pleasure?

Speaking of "guilty" and "France"... a man from Senegal was busted at a passport check recently whilst crossing from the Turkish (northern) part of Cyprus into the Greek (southern) part of the island. It seems that the dummy was traveling with a forged French passport... but the guy was wearing an English soccer jersey. I can't begin to tell you how silly and obvious that is... it's worse than walking around Fenway Park in a Yankees jersey, or walking around McAfee Coliseum in Oakland wearing a Steelers jersey. What a moron!

Ever hear of Bath Chaps? How about Bedfordshire Clanger? They're both "classic" British dishes and they're both in danger of dying out. Perhaps it's because of their contents - Bath Chaps is "pig's cheeks in breadcrumbs" while Bedfordshire Clanger is "scrag end of mutton with kidneys and fruit". I'm currently reading Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour (see the link to Amazon in the "Up To The Minute" section below), and in reading it I've realized just how wasteful Americans truly are. Bourdain describes dozens of dishes made out of all kinds of body parts most Americans wouldn't feed to a dog, much less themselves. He describes true French cooking in exquisite detail - not just the high-end dishes you see at snotty French restaurants here in the US, but "honest" country food as well. He celebrates it as a long process of making culinary perfection from whatever ingredients French chefs had around. And although British people no longer need to eat pig's cheeks, this news still makes me sad in a way. I'd never considered that food can disappear just as historic buildings or precious manuscripts too. And I for one hate so see things like this go... even if I'll be damned if I'm gonna eat it!

I have absolutely no idea why, but I am totally addicted to this website. Basically, it's just a simple webpage that reports the status of some washers and dryers at a dorm at MIT. But I normally surf the Internet with 25 (or more) tabs open in Firefox, and I often keep this page open and just check in to see what's going on. Who's washing their clothes at 3am? Is Shake (Washer #3) broken, since it hasn't been used in 8 days? Or is it just because it's summer break? Call me weird, but if you check on the site a few times a day, you just start to wonder what's going on in that laundry room somewhere on the MIT campus.

Lastly for today, I just wanted to let you know that one of my favorite British shows - Life on Mars - has finally come to BBC America. The series premiere was actually last night (oooops!), but it will come on again this Sunday at 9pm and also Sunday night (Monday morning) at midnight. The premiere episode should also be on BBC America On Demand this week (if you get that on your cable system). The show's "normal" air time is Mondays at 10pm.

07/26/2006: If at first you don't succeed... fake it! At least that's what Persey Tours, a Moscow-based "travel agency" is doing these days. It seems that the agency started as your average, run-of-the-mill travel agency. It was a dismal failure, so the owners decided to try something else: selling memories of fake vacations! For around $500, they'll hook you up with counterfeit boarding pass stubs, fake hotel bills... even photographs with you photoshopped in front of landmarks! Although this seems cool as a concept - who wouldn't want to brag to friends about their travels to all corners of the world? - the $500 price tag makes me wonder who's buying this junk. After all, two real trips to London didn't cost much more than $500 each... so why fake it? Read more about it here on Yahoo! News.

Good news for Guy Ritchie fans: "Mr. Madonna" has signed on to direct a real, actual gangster film. Entitled Static, the film focuses on "a wrongly imprisoned gangster who, with the help of his loyal posse, must make his way across town through crooked cops and rival gangs in order to testify against the dirty cops who put him away". The film will hopefully not repeat the mistakes of his last two films, Swept Away and Revolver, both of which, well... sucked.

Bad news for Bob Geldof (and his dwindling fan base): Sir Bob recently refused to perform at a concert in Milan, Italy... because promoters had sold a grand total of 45 tickets - out of the stadium's total capacity of 12,000. When fans protested that they'd come a long way to see him, Geldof allegedly snapped back that "[he'd] come a long way, too. [He'd] just come from South Africa - it took [him] 48 hours to get here". Contrast this with the recent ABC show here in Charlotte, where Martin Fry and company played to a crowd that wasn't much larger than 45 people. Fry was a perfect showman, saying that the small but enthusiastic crowd sounded like 60,000 people, even though we were well short of that number.

A sign of the times: the makers of the British version of the Monopoly board game have announced that new versions of the game will no longer use colorful play money, but will instead use Visa-branded "debit cards". Some of the addresses have changed in the British version, and some of the "Chance" and "Community Chest" cards have been updated for our times - the one that used to reward you for winning a beauty pageant now rewards you for winning a reality TV show, for example. Word is that newer versions of the American game will also include the "debit cards" too. For some reason, swiping a fake debit card just isn't as fan as throwing down that fake cash.

Speaking of debit cards... most people that use debit cards heavily also tend to use "self-checkout" lanes at grocery stores. And guess what? Those self-checkout lanes are apparently killing impulse purchases. In fact, impulse purchases by self-checkouters have plummeted 27.9 percent for men and 50 percent for women. Part of this has to do with the fact that most retailers with self-checkout systems don't place items like magazines, batteries or snacks in self-checkout lanes. But there's more to it than just that - the very act of having customers scan and bag their own merchandise means that they're no longer staring into space (or, hopefully, at the candy and magazines) as the cashier does the work for them. The interesting this will be how stores go about fixing this "problem".

Some people say that "technology is a solution looking for a problem". I usually disagree with them, but when it comes to the latest invention of those wacky Japanese, the Luddites may be right. Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have developed "intelligent" carpet that can detect the weight, age, and gender of an individual walking across the carpet. It's "nearly perfect" when detecting the age of someone between 20 and 60, and detects gender correctly 75% of the time. Why on earth would someone want or need this? According to Engadget, researchers hope to use it to "[analyze] shopping patterns or audience demographics at various entertainment venues".

That's it for today... more food news tomorrow!

07/27/2006: Wow - there's so much random crap today, I just don't know where to begin! As of this same time yesterday, I was thinking about writing a long rant about Bobby Flay's new Food Network show, Throwdown With Bobby Flay (hint: the show's rigged in Flay's favor as much as possible). However, I typed up a rant about it in The Lounge at the Ars Technica forums and posted it there instead. The original story is here and the Ars thread is here (you should read it, it's pretty funny). In other food news, a company in San Francisco has come up with a device that looks like a tongue depressor and is coated with "molecularly imprinted polymers". When stirred in a cup of coffee, tea or soda, the device removes around 70% of the caffeine in the drink, with no change to the taste or aroma of the beverage. That's pretty cool stuff, especially for those folks that are sensitive to caffeine (like my grandmother). One could easily carry a few of these around for the times a restaurant or gas station is out of (or doesn't carry) decaf coffee.

Wanna read something cool? Check out this article at MSNBC about the possible future of air travel: the microjet. Sometimes called "SUVs with wings", these tiny jets seat 4 to 8 people, can travel around 1,300 miles and are designed to be flown by a single pilot. Once production ramps up, these lil' planes are expected to cost a fraction of what Learjets do, which would allow a charter company to buy 5 or 6 microjets for the cost of a single Lear. It's anticipated that a seat on one of these jets would be slightly more than coach fare on a major airline, but plans to operate microjets out of any of the 5,000 smaller airports in America - airports with free parking and no security hassles - should appeal to business travelers. (Aside: When I lived in Atlanta, a company called Epps Aviation ran commercials on local radio stations about the cost-effectiveness of chartering one of their jets for business meetings. Although the cost - around $5,000 - seemed high, the cost wasn't that much more than a short-notice ticket on Delta if you had 6-8 people from the same company going to a meeting or convention. Additionally, a charter jet is on your schedule, and flying out of a small airport like DeKalb-Peachtree airport is a breath of fresh air compared to Atlanta's mega-sized Hartsfield airport.) If microjets end up taking off (haha!) with business travelers, it's even thought that prices might lower enough to bring casual consumers into the mix. Imagine sitting at work and wishing that you had a "dirty water" hot dog from a New York street vendor or a pizza from Geno's East in Chicago... If microjets become popular, you might just be able to meet your hunny at the local airport after work and take an "on-demand" flight to NYC or Chicago for not a lot of money, and on your own schedule, too! One other cool piece of airline news: the US Air Force is developing a way to not only refuel planes in flight, but also to rearm them too! The article I found about it was short on details, but it sounds cool regardless!

Here's news that will make both my hunny and the tree-huggers happy: many cities are looking in to replacing concrete sidewalks with rubber ones! It seems that the rubber surface is easier on the human body (both for jogging and in case of slips and falls), doesn't crack due to frost or roots, and also makes environmentalists happy because they're made from some of the nearly 300 million tires Americans discard each year. Over 60 US cities have installed them so far to glowing reviews from residents.

Lastly for today, here's some irony for you: Fox Entertainment president Peter Liguori recently told members of the press that "the proliferation of serialized dramas offered by the networks this year might start to wear on viewers, especially if many of them end up getting cancelled before fans see a satisfying ending to the show's story arc". Allow me to repeat this: the PRESIDENT of FOX said that VIEWERS might get UPSET if NETWORKS start CANCELLING shows without giving them resolution. If you don't understand why this is funny (and\or ironic), allow me to illustrate with one of my favorite quotes from Family Guy:

"Well, unfortunately, Lois, there's just no more room on the schedule. We've just got to accept the fact that Fox has to make room for terrific shows, like 'Dark Angel', 'Titus', 'Undeclared', 'Action', 'That '80s Show', 'Wonderfalls', 'Fastlane', 'Andy Richter Controls the Universe', 'Skin', 'Girls Club', 'Cracking Up', 'The Pitts', 'Firefly', 'Get Real', 'Freaky Links', 'Wanda at Large', 'Costello', 'The Lone Gunmen', 'A Minute with Stan Hooper', 'Normal, Ohio', 'Pasadena', 'Harsh Realm', 'Keen Eddie', 'The Street', 'American Embassy', 'Cedric the Entertainer', 'The Tick', 'Louie', and 'Greg the Bunny'."

And since that episode aired, you can add Arrested Development and Reunion to the list. Bastards!

07/30/2006: In case you haven't figured out the French part of the tagline... here's a hint:

J'en ai marre de ceux qui pleurent
Qui ne roule qu'a 2 a l'heure
Qui se lamentent et qui s'fixent
Sur l'idee d'une idee fixe
J'en ai marre de ceux qui ralent
Des extremistes a 2 balles
Qui voient la vie tout en noire
Qui m'expedient dans l'cafard
J'en ai marre de la grande soeur
Qui gemit tout et qui pleure
Marre de la pluie, des courgettes
Qui m'font vomir sous la couette
J'en ai marre de ces cyniques
Et dans les pres les colchiques
J'en ai marre d'en avoir marre

Or.... you could just keep scrolling down. Also, I updated the Top 10 list for this week!

08/01/2006: Congratulations to Madonna for her FIVE nominations at this years MTV Music Video Awards!

What is it with Boston lately? First you've got the whole "Big Dig falling apart" thing... now you've got the Green River Cemetery, which is sliding down a hill. Apparently, "strong storms knocked down trees and washed away several yards of soil on the cemetery's northern side" back in March, and this has caused around 50 graves to become exposed and teeter on the brink of sliding down to 200 foot drop-off into the Green River. Oh, and while I'm on the subject of Boston, Boston Globe TV editor Matthew Gilbert is apparently quite happy watching TV on the same 20" TV set he bought 15 years ago. Gilbert thinks that big screens and HDTV are distactions that take away from the writing and camerawork. Which is fine, I guess... if that's the way you want to roll, so be it. But it just seems weird for a TV critic to not own a decent TV set. It's like a car critic driving a '87 Hyundai, or a food critic regularly eating at McDonald's. Oh, and speaking of food, Britain's left-wing newspaper The Guardian recently ran a piece questioning the safety of the increasing amounts of soy in the diets of Americans and Europeans. It seems that "traditional" soy-based foods like tofu and soy sauce are fermented, which drastically cuts down the amount of phyto-estrogens in the food. Unfermented soy products - the ones we in the West have been eating - are apparently teeming with such estrogens, which apparently cause cancer. So maybe soy isn't healthy after all.

Imagine running a website. Imagine that the website's main business is to check the spelling on your customer's websites. Imagine how embarrassed you'd be if your site's software had such misspellings as "independant", "accomodation" and "definately". Well, at least one company doesn't have to imagine this: TextTrust, a Toronto-based company that offers to check the spelling on your website for a small fee, recently admitted that the company's software indeed misspelled those three words (if not more). I know that people aren't prefect, but jeez - you're supposed to be spellchecking experts, people!

Some quick Hollywood news: Tori Spelling is now... a poor little not-so-rich girl. She'll be inheriting a measly $800,000 from her father, even though he had around $500 million at his death. Wentworth Miller hates that faux tattoo he has to wear for his show Prison Break (and why not? It takes four hours to apply every day he's on the set!). And apparently Tom Cruise played dirty on his high school wrestling team. For some reason, that simply doesn't surprise me. And lastly for today: a picture of David Beckham in a white Speedo for the ladies, and a hot photoshoot of Stacy Keibler for the guys.

08/15/2006: Sorry for the disappearing act for the past couple of weeks. Once again, your favorite blogger was suffering with yet another case of writer's block. I still don't have any new (original) articles to post... so let's go right to the news:

You might have heard of Takeru Kobayashi, the skinny Japanese "competitive eater" that routinely humiliates Americans at Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest every Independence Day in New York. Kobayashi recently won this year's Johnsonville World Bratwurst Eating Championship, held this past August 5th in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He stuffed an amazing 58 bratwursts into his gullet in 12 minutes. But what blew me away about the whole thing was what those 58 bratwurst added up to: 16,820 calories, 1,450 grams of fat and 19 days worth of the recommended amount of sodium. It makes me sick (literally) just thinking about it, and I love bratwurst. Get the full story from Yahoo! News here.

Speaking of calories, Dr. Robert H. Lustig (professor of pediatric endocrinology at UCSF) wants to remind you that fruit juices aren't necessarily any better for you than soda. In an article recently posted to a UCSF website, Lustig points out that a 12-ounce serving of fruit juice averages 170 calories, whilst a same-size serving of soda only contains around 150 calories. What's worse, fruit juices usually contain fructose, which is worse for you than the sugars contained in soda. Fructose does nothing to suppress the production of ghrelin, a hormone made by the stomach that controls the feelings of hunger. One can literally drink orange juice all day long and not feel any "fuller" than when he started. Fructose also harms the liver, although you'd need to read his article to find out the specifics of it, as it's way too complicated to explain here. I don't think that Dr. Lustig is advocating drinking Coke instead of apple juice, however - sodas typically have few (if any) nutrients. His main point is to remind folks that "Juice = good, soda = bad" isn't entirely correct, and an assumption that juices are better for you because they're "all natural" is not correct.

If not juice... how about wine? Or, more specifically, "whine". And by whine, I'm referring to both a new textbook for British schools and a man named Davis Jones. It seems that a new textbook on citizenship published for 14-16 year-olds in the UK says that "children have the right to protection from physical and emotional abuse"... then goes on to list bullying and cross-country running as examples of physical abuse! Now, I hated cross-country as much as the next guy, but come on... abuse? Especially when they teach it in school? When obesity in the UK is starting to become the same epidemic it is in the US? Bullocks! Unfortunately, calculus is not listed as "emotional abuse", although it certainly is in my mind! Oh, and Davis Jones is a Raleigh, NC native that was offended when statues of great North Carolinians surrounding the state's capital building were decked out in Carolina Hurricanes jerseys following their Stanley Cup win. Davis whined: "Do you think Andrew Jackson, sitting majestically on his horse while wearing a Hurricanes jersey was awe-inspiring and thought-provoking? No, it was a distraction and derailed the purpose of the monument to both educate and honor". I'm glad that everything is so perfect in Jones' world that the only thing he has to complain about are statues wearing jerseys. To make it even sillier, Davis picked Andrew Jackson as his example... when Old Hickory wasn't even born in North Carolina! He was born in a town that straddled the NC\SC line; although historians from both states like to claim him as a native son, Jackson himself claimed to be born in South Carolina, so I'll take his word on it.

More signs of the apocalypse: Rocco DiSpirito is returning to television, this time as a "culinary therapist.... solving ordinary people's problems through the use of food". Ummmmmm.... OK. Sure. Yeah, I'm gonna watch that! Also, a Canadian company called Ice Rocks has come out with "designer ice cubes" made from purified water. They come pre-packaged and cost around 10¢ a cube, and believe it or not, they're selling like hotcakes - not as as convenience item, but because some people don't like the taste of ice made from their local tap water. Hey dumbasses - a gallon of Kroger\Safeway\Albertson's\Publix drinking water is only like... 69¢, and a 5-pack of plastic ice cube trays are only like $1.49 at Wal Mart or Target. Save some money, OK? Unless you enjoy discussing the provenance of your ice cubes... in which case, you're just plain creepy.

Guess what? Europe is finally doing something about those silly "no smoking" signs in airplanes... in fact, they're going to replace them with "no mobile" signs. Since smoking on planes has been banned since the 1990s, those signs have been utterly useless. However, since the EU is going to allow people to use mobile phones on planes beginning in 2007, all older planes will be retrofitted with the new signs, and all new planes manufactured by Scarebus will have the signs, which consist of a pictogram of a mobile phone with the "international no" symbol - a red slash - running through it.

And lastly, thanks to Ge0ph from Ars Technica for whipping up this GREAT GUIDE for tweaking a default install of Windows XP. If you (or any of your friends) are constantly fiddling with their Registry or system files, be sure to send this link to them - it'll save you the hassle of fixing their computer(s) later!

ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I updated the "Up To The Minute" and "What You Might Not Know" sections (below).

08/31/2006: The rumors have been floating around for years... could it finally be proven true?

It's not a very pleasant sight, is it? On the other hand, two things that *are* pleasant to look at include Angelina Jolie impersonator Tiffany Clause and the 2008 Dodge Challenger. Are you a big Britney Spears fan? How would you like to pay $200+ for... Britney's leftover egg salad sandwich and K-fed's leftover corndog? They're available on eBay for the next couple of hours! Ever wondered why most new CDs sound like crap? It's because of something called the "Loudness Race", and you can find information about it here (focus: Depeche Mode's Playing The Angel) or here (focus: Rush's Vapor Trails). Looking for some Internet time wasters? Start with Oceangram, a site that lets you throw virtual messages in bottles into a virtual ocean, and allows others to view (and reply) to the messages and throw them back into the virtual sea. If you're jonesing for some new tuneage, check out pandora.com. It's an offshoot of the Music Genome Project, a project that "assembl[ed] literally hundreds of musical attributes or 'genes' into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony". All you do is go to the site and enter an artist or song that you like and they'll stream dozens of similar songs to your computer for free! It's interesting to see what Pandora comes up with when asked to find analogues to Saint Etienne or "Frozen" by Madonna. Some of the choices seem "off", but overall Pandora does her job well, especially when mixing in tunes you might not have expected. You can even give each track the thumbs up or thumbs down to tweak your results even more... which is always helpful when Pandora picks the random Cher song to add to your mix... something she seems to do with alarming regularity!

ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I added a new poll (what's your favorite "ethnic" cuisine?) and also updated the Useless Fact.

09/01/2006: It's a sad day today... George Johnson, believed to be the last surviving American WWI veteran, died in Los Angeles at 112 years-old today. Johnson - born in Philadelphia on May 1, 1894 - was working as a mail sorter when he was drafted in 1917. The war ended before he could be sent to Europe, and Johnson and his wife moved to California. The newspapers say that Johnson remained in good health and even continued to drive until he was 102. His wife died in 1992; the couple had no children.

In happier news, German researchers have found some of Johann Sebastian Bach's oldest transcripts. The works - transcriptions of chorale fantasias “Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein” by Dietrich Buxtehude and “An Wasserfluessen Babylon” by Johann Adam Reinken - were written in 1700, when Bach was just a 15 year-old schoolboy. The technically demanding manuscripts prove that Bach was a virtuoso at an early age and also prove that "that Bach went to Lueneburg in order to learn more about the influential North German organ school in Hamburg and Luebeck". Cool beans!

Are you a fan of The Colbert Report? If so, you might enjoy this site, which allows you to make your very own "On Notice" board. Check out mine:

OK, this news is waaaaaayyy late, but I just wanted to say that I actually felt bad for ol' Boy George a couple of weeks ago. You might know that he was ordered to perform community service for falsely reporting a burglary as part of a plea bargain that allowed him to escape of drug possession charges. Boy had offered to host one (or more) AIDS benefits to fulfill that community service requirement, but the judge insisted that Boy clean up a park in lower Manhattan. However, so many reporters were there snapping pictures of Boy sweeping up leaves and trash that he simply couldn't get any work done. "It's supposed to me making me humble... Why don't you just let me do it?" George asked the throng of photographers. Officials from the NYC sanitation department realized that this was silly, and so moved George to a fenced parking lot in Chinatown so he could do some actual work. Read all about it here.

Oh hey... speaking of crime and punishment, tip your hat to Nebraska's Kevin Holder... who was arrested for the 226th time a couple of weeks ago. Yes, you read right - he's been arrested 226 times, all of which adds up to a rap sheet that's 43 pages long! Sadly, Holder doesn't even come close to the record number of arrests in Lincoln-Lancaster county. With 226 arrests, he's only at #40; the all-time record is held by Edward Rooks, who was arrested 652 times!

What if they held a peace rally... and a brawl broke out? That's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago in Colombo, Sri Lanka! Around 1,000 people gathered in a park in the tiny nation's capital to protest the latest violence in the nation's 20+ year-old civil war... when a bunch of Buddhist monks that oppose peace concessions to Tamil Tiger rebels stormed the stage and began hanging banners and interrupting the rally's speakers. Moderate monks took offense to this, and before you cold say "Om", fists and robes were flying!

Lastly, here's something for your holiday weekend... a hot, hot, hot picture of Jenna Fischer from The Office:

09/08/2006: Not much new here, but I *did* update the "What you might not know" and "Up To The Minute" sections on the front page (scroll down to read). I *do* have a somewhat amusing thing to tell you about though... I've been playing around with SBS 2003 in a virtual machine for the past couple of days, as my GF's company is finally planning on upgrading their ancient NT 4.0 server to something a bit more modern. Setting up SBS 2003 takes something like 600 reboots, so I was wasting some time this morning by reading this article at Straightdope.com whilst waiting for the virtual machine to reboot from a SQL update. When I got halfway down the page, I noticed this ad:

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. Come to Canada so you can jog in your underwear? Come to Canada to watch unattractive girls in mismatched underwear run? Is this the image that Canada truly wants? Just in case you think I'm lying, here's a link to the full screen cap, and here's the page that the ad links to (notice how cheap they are - the "free economy class" plane tickets are from Chicago to Toronto! I guess that's offset by the CAN$50 gift card they give you!).

It's not much of a secret that Iron Chef Cat Cora is a lesbian (Wikipedia says that he lives in California with her  partner Jennifer). But what was a secret was what she's got goin' on underneath those chef's aprons:

Rwwwwwwwwaaaarrrr! She looks good!

09/19/2006: Before the breakup of AT&T back in 1984, just about everyone leased their telephones from Ma Bell. This allowed the home user to swap out defective phones at a phone company office or upgrade to a newer model with better features for no charge. As you might imagine, this was actually quite expensive too - recurring charges of $5.95/month (or more) were add to phone bills, and AT&T's monopoly power meant that you couldn't go to a store and buy your own phone... they simply weren't for sale anywhere. Since the breakup, the market for phone hardware has been opened up, and basic telephones can be purchased for less than $10 just about anywhere... but what about all those phones that were being leased? It's hard to imagine, but some folks out there still have them - take the case of Ester Strogen of Canton, Ohio. Now 82 years old, Ester was (until very recently) still leasing her two rotary phones from AT&T for the low, low price of $29.10 a month! Ester's granddaughters (who have recently taken over bill paying duties for their grandmother) were outraged to find that Ester has needlessly paid around $14,000 per phone since 1985, when customers were allowed to opt-out of the program scam! What's even scarier is that 750,000 people still lease phones from their phone company - people that Ester's granddaughters think might be elderly and not know that they need not pay AT&T's hefty leasing rates. Scarier still: this article on Yahoo! News about Ester's story actually explains what rotary phones are and how they worked, presumably because there are enough people out there that have no idea what they were or how they worked! Jeez - do *I* feel old!

It might sound silly or a little weird, but Football Outsiders has an excellent (and lengthy!) article about stadium parking (of all things). I bet you have no idea of how much thought and planning goes in to parking situations, do you? Well, neither did I - until I got my learn on. My favorite factoid from the article: every Arizona Cardinals ticket comes with a "free" parking pass, in the form of a "hang tag" that hangs from your rearview mirror. This speeds up parking considerably, as fans don't have to stop and pay an attendant, they just get waved in to the lot. And no discussion of football would be complete without a list of YouTube links to some of the sport's most painful injuries, such as Napoleon McCallum's painful leg break, Tim Krumrie's left leg turning into Jell-O during Super Bowl XXIII, and (of course) the infamous Lawrence Taylor's career ending sack of Joe Theismann. For sheer shock value though, nothing can beat the clip of the Buffalo Sabre's goaltender Clint Malarchuk getting his throat slashed by an errant skate back in 1989. Steve Tuttle of the St. Louis Blues and Uwe Krupp of the Sabres collided at the front of the goal, and Tuttle's skate caught poor Malarchuk on the throat, slicing open his outer jugular vein. At least seven spectators fainted and two had heart attacks at the sight of all the blood gushing on the ice!

So - having talked about pools of blood and slashed jugular veins - what better time to talk about food than now, no? Here's a double barrel of news from Slashfood: a big hit at the Texas State Fair? Deep Fried Coca Cola. Don't care for sushi? Why not try a Deep South Sushi Roll, which looks just like authentic sushi but is actually dark meat chicken, roasted okra and rice, served in rolled up collard greens. A group of Swedish university students recently tried (and failed) to recreate Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" experiment; according to Professor Fredrik Nyström, the students' liver function was slightly abnormal for a time, then returned to normal, and they didn't report the weight gain that Spurlock did. If you can't super-size your meal... why not shrink it? A poster by the nickname of "hercuteness" recently posted this on the craftster.org forums - a teeny tiny fast food meal (the whole thing is around the size of a Splenda packet) made out of actual food! OK, so the tray and drink were made of clay, but still... you *must* check out the work on that burger - it's amazing!

09/22/2006: A quick update about the site: my apologies to anyone that accessed this site in the past 24-36 hours. My webhost did some behind the scenes upgrades late last week (which I knew about), then did some additional tweaks this week (that I didn't know about). Whatever they did seriously broke some things on the site, particularly the counter and clock. I attempted to fix these issues on Thursday, but only succeeded in making things worse for a while (example: for some reason the left shared border (that thing on the left side of the page where the links and new counter are) stopped working, so I removed it and put it back... which only succeeded in placing a left border on all pages on the site, even the ones that don't need it). Needless to say, just about everything is working again, but the shared border fiasco made me re-think a few things:

First of all, the Member's Section is no more. It never really took off like I hoped it would, and that is completely my fault. I envisioned a section of the site crammed with torrents, warez and mp3s, but every time I went to put something like that on the site that little voice in the back of my head said "Do you really want to host warez on a domain with your freakin' name on it?" The short answer: no. You'll notice that the link on the left has been changed to "Dropbox", which will still be available for files I want to allow friends to download.

Secondly, the "reapplication" of the shared border meant that every one of my ArsCrew\NoNameRadio playlists inherited a shared border. People actually looked at the playlists back when I was doing the Internet DJ thing, but no one has accessed them in a while, so I just decided to archive them rather than remove the shared border from 100+ individual HTML files. If you should ever want to see them for some reason, let me know - they're still here on the server, just zipped up in a private folder.

Lastly. I got rid of the site's MP3 player - not because I didn't like it, but because it was a huge pain to maintain: mp3 files had to be uploaded to the server, and each mp3 had to be entered into an XML file to create the playlist. It's not THAT much work, but it's one of those things that sounds great at the time but ends up being a huge pain in the ass later on. So there.

I will (hopefully) have a new History Blog entry up in the next couple of days. We don't smoke in the house any more, and while it's helped our asthmatic kitty a lot and made the house smell a whole lot better, it's absolutely killed whatever creative juices I have, so it's been difficult writing anything longer than a couple of paragraphs. Oh well... I'll deal, right?

09/27/2006: Hey everyone... long time no see! Well, I have just installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, and this allows me to write columns for the site simply by speaking into a microphone, instead of actually having to type everything out. This will (hopefully) make writing easier for me in the very near future. I have several new ideas for articles, so hopefully I can get that off the ground in the next few days or so. In the meantime, how about a double barrel full of news...

Terrell Owens killing himself? We should be so lucky!

What if a celebrity had a sex tape that no one wanted to see? Word on the street is that Dustin Diamond (Screech from Saved by the Bell) is the star of his very own sex tape, which features a threesome, and even - are you ready for it? - a Dirty Sanchez! That's absolutely disgusting! Rob Lowe? Paris Hilton? Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee? Sure, I'll watch tapes of any of those people... Dustin Diamond giving some tramp and Sanchez? Not so much.

And hey, speaking of bad celebrity behavior... guess who's fallen off the wagon again? None other than sweet little Kate Moss! She apparently attended a Babyshambles concert in Ireland last night and was spotted with "mysterious white blobs" in her nose. Of course, we have no idea what those white blobs might be, so be be your own judge here and check out this picture at The Superficial.

Is there no end to the Rachael Ray empire? Not only does the woman have 10 shows on Food Network, her own magazine, and now her very own talk show on a major network... now she's coming out with her own line of music CDs! No need to worry though: she's not singing, they're simply "soundtrack albums" that Rachel would play a party or dinner. The first album, to be entitled (I swear to God) How Cool Is That Christmas will be released on October 10 of this year.

And although Rachael Ray is, in fact, building her own empire, there's no need as yet to worry about her making the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list: for the first time in the list's history, only billionaires are included on the list. That's right folks, $999 million isn't enough to get you on the Forbes 400 list any more. And you know what those Forbes 400 people can afford? Some of British company Duerrs' new "world's most expensive marmalade"! It's made with Seville oranges, 62-year-old Dalmore whiskey, vintage Pol Roger Champagne and enough edible gold to "give it a tantalizing gleam"! The price for a 1 kg (crystal, natch) jar: $9,500!

And last but not least for today, Hollywood is going to dogs! The MPAA has just bought two new dogs - Lucky and Flo - to sniff out optical discs in luggage and other containers to stop those discs for making it to manufacturing plants where they can be pirated. On the one hand, this offends me as yet another silly publicity stunt by the Hollywood types to whine about piracy. On the other hand, it's nice seeing them go after the real pirates for change.

10/04/2006: Wow - actual NEW CONTENT! I added a few additional Windows short cuts to the Geek Stuff page and also added a brand new Travel Tips page (for general travel, not my London-specific page). Enjoy those; I hope to get some "bloggy stuff" up tomorrow!

10/06/2006: I've added almost too much new stuff to keep track of! I added several new things to the Downloads page, a new tip to the Geek Stuff page, a few new tips to the Travel Tips page, a brand new page about using Google to access unsecured security cameras, added a few new things to the British English Glossary and updated the downloadable PDF file of that page. I also updated my MP3 list and started work on yet another travel tips page - this one for Europeans (and others) coming to America! Whew!

10/15/2006: Ohmygosh! The FUNNIEST THING happened tonight! Lisa and I have a good friend that got married in Hawai'i recently. So tonight (Saturday, October 14th), the newlyweds had a post-wedding reception at Phil and Tony's Pizza, which is at the Arboretum here in Charlotte... - one of those new "village-style" shopping malls. The couple has reserved a room just inside the door, and the private area had two large windows in it. As luck would have it, the cake, wedding presents and a few photo albums were kept on tables just in front of one of those huge windows, so there was often someone (or a group of folks) congregating there in front of the window.

So at one point during the evening, a cop parked her cruiser in the fire lane just in front of the huge window. She didn't have her lights or siren on - she just parked and walked away. A few minutes later, she returned, with a young Hispanic man in tow. She stopped just in front of the window and pushed the kid against the car as she tried cuffing him. This set off a round of hoots and hollers from our crowd, and someone whipped out a camera and snapped a picture. The Hispanic kid then started hamming it up for the cameras, blowing kisses and trying to pose... while the female cop (who was barely 5'2", if that) continued trying to cuff him. I don't know exactly was happened next - either the kid pushed the cop, or they accidentally fell down together - but one way or another, they ended up on the ground, with the kid on top. He tried to pin down the cop, but instead she flipped him over and started pounding on his head - WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! You could almost see the kid's head bouncing off the pavement as this lil' female cop was just wailing on him.

He settled down after that. Certainly his "smart ass" act came to a screeching halt after the cop sat on the punk's back until backup arrived. It was just so funny seeing this tiny cop just taking down this poor unsuspecting teenager!

10/16/2006: Who would open a race track where betting is illegal? The Israelis, of course! The $20 million track (a project of the Israeli government) opened last week in Nir Yaffe, and, as mentioned, gambling there is strictly prohibited - as it is the the rest of Israel. And then there's those crazy Bulgarians - a 57 year-old woman killed her son, then was released from prison when it was discovered that she had terminal cancer. Upon her release she immediately went home... and killed her husband! If her husband were a sports fan, she might not need to bother killing him - it seems that many men will delay going to the emergency room if there's a big game on! It seems that Dr. David Jerrard - an ER doctor at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore - noticed a couple of years ago that the number of men seeking medical attention at his ER dropped by 30% during sporting events, then surged an extra 40% after the event ended. Thankfully, most of these cases involved minor issues and not heart attacks! Speaking of heart attacks, Martha Stewart almost had one the other day when Andy Dick appeared as a guest on her show. Which member of Martha's staff thought Andy Dick would be a good match for Martha's show? Perhaps that person ought to be sent to the Bahamas, where the cat-o'-nine-tails is still a legitimate form of punishment! In fact, a 34 yea-old man named Altulus Newbold made the headlines last week for receiving a sentence of eight lashes for the attempted rape of an 83 year-old woman. The "cat" is a whip made of several lengths of knotted cord. It was originally a punishment used in the 18th century British Navy and was outlawed in the Bahamas many, many years ago. However, due to rising crime rates, it was reinstated in 1991. So... what's the lesson here? Don't screw around in the Bahamas!

10/19/2006: Back in the mid-1980s, the “Baby Boomer” generation began entering middle age. Many began to look back to their childhoods for comfort or nostalgia, and one of the things that stuck out in their collective memories was baseball cards. These simple pieces of paper with player photos on them brought back powerful memories of lazy summer afternoons trading cards with friends, breathlessly opening new packs hoping for “THE card”, and even putting the cards into the spokes of their bicycles to create faux motorcycle sounds as they pedaled down the street.

Unfortunately for the Boomers, most of their mothers had thrown the cards away ages ago, thinking them to be worthless. However, since the Boomers were entering their prime earning years, many had cash to spend on the hitherto “worthless” cards. Almost overnight, a huge market opened up for old baseball cards, and cards that might have sold for a quarter at garage sales now started commanding hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

The baseball card industry took immediate notice. They began producing baseball cards of all kinds: cards based on “classic” 1950s designs, cards branded under the names of 1950s manufacturers (like Bowman) that had long since gone out of business, cards with “low numbers” (which included last season’s rosters) and cards with “high numbers” (which incorporated last-minute trades), packs of cards with autographed cards or other pieces of memorabilia, and so on. And where there had been only two companies making baseball cards in the early 1980s (longtime market leader Topps and perennial second-banana Fleer), new companies like Donruss, Score and Upper Deck entered into the market.

Baseball card hysteria took off in the early 1990s. Most every town, regardless of size, seemed to have at least one card shop. And with so many cards available, markets for subsidiary items like price guides and protective plastic casings helped fill the stores’ shelves as well. People began buying cards left and right, but not for the nostalgia value – they were hoping to pay for their kid’s college education with a few boxes of baseball cards. Card auctions were closely watched, as prices for cards seemed to rise ever higher.

Alas, it wasn’t to last. For the baseball card craze was just another economic bubble. A bubble is defined as “a market condition in which the prices of commodities or asset classes increase to absurd or unsustainable levels (that no longer reflect utility of usage and purchasing power). It occurs when speculation in the underlying asset causes the price to increase, thus encouraging even more speculation”. The problem with bubbles is that they always burst – which means that the prices drop dramatically. In the case of baseball cards, some people took a deep breath and looked at the market. They saw companies like Topps and Upper Deck flooding the market with “rare” and “limited edition” cards and realized that the cards were worth far less than what they were selling for. And so they stopped buying. This had a ripple effect on the market, and more and more people stopped buying. Soon, the market collapsed altogether. Prices fell through the floor. Card shops closed by the thousands. Cards that once fetched hundreds now sold for pennies on eBay.

As you might guess, the baseball card bubble wasn’t the only “bubble” in history. In fact, it’s not even the strangest – for that we have to go back to the Netherlands in the 17^th century.

You might think that tulips are native to the Netherlands. You’d be wrong. They are, in fact, native to southern Europe and the Middle East. They were introduced to northern Europe via Ottoman Turkey sometime in the late 1500s, and the first known instance of them being cultivated in Holland was by Charles de L'Ecluse in 1593. The flowers rapidly became both a luxury item and a status symbol. The highest possible prices were paid for tulip bulbs with unique colors or lines. Trading in tulip bulbs began in many Dutch stock exchanges. People from all parts of society began speculating in bulbs. As you might imagine, the rich only invested money they could afford to lose, whilst many middle class families sold or traded land, livestock or even personal possessions to get in on the action.

And what action it was! By 1623, a single common-variety tulip bulb could cost thousands of florins at a time when the average income was 150 florins a year. In 1635, a single bulb – the Semper Augustus – sold for 6,000 florins; that same 6,000 florins could have bought 60 tons of butter or 200 well-fed pigs! In that same year, a sale of 40 bulbs was recorded for the princely sum of 100,000 florins, or approximately the average income of 667 people. A good trader could make around 60,000 florins a month, and the system for purchasing tulips became so complex that the Dutch began speculating on bulbs that hadn’t even been planted yet – effectively creating the futures market.

But just like the baseball card market, it couldn’t last. By February of 1637, prices simply couldn’t go any higher, so tulip traders began to sell. People that had dabbled in tulip futures were now left owning contracts to buy tulips at ten times the cost they were going for on the open market. Others were left owning dozens (or even hundreds) of bulbs they had paid huge amounts for and which were now worthless. Thousands of families throughout the Netherlands were financially ruined.

You’d think that other Europeans would have learned something from Holland’s “Tulip Mania”, but, in fact, they did not. The same scenario repeated itself throughout Europe for the next 150 years – especially in England, where the average price for a tulip bulb hit 15 guineas in 1800, which was enough money to feed, clothe and house a laborer and his family for six months! Thankfully, “Tulip Mania” didn’t hit the rest of Europe on the same scale as it did in the Netherlands.

10/27/2006: This story has been told and retold on the Internet so many times that it should be old-hat by now. Unfortunately, it's almost always told incorrectly. I don't claim to have any special knowledge of the subject, but I have read several books on the birth of personal computers; I have also seen the documentary "Revenge of the Nerds" and the TNT film "The Pirates of Silicon Valley", so I think that entitles me to weigh in on the subject.

IBM long prided itself on making the best computers in the world. IBM made huge mainframe computers, elegant, power-hungry monsters that were as big as a refrigerator on the small end and as big as a tractor trailer on the large end. IBM made billions making "real" computers like these, so it's not entirely surprising that they initially looked at the "personal computer" of the late 1970s as a toy. Much to their distress, however, companies like Apple, Commodore and Timex were shipping personal computers by the millions. While IBM scoffed at the notion that a personal computer could be useful for anything more than storing recipes, entire industries were being built up around the Apple II and the Commodore 64. IBM's absence from the personal computer market thus started to become quite noticeable. After all, IBM was seen by most Americans as the computer company... yet they offered nothing for the home consumer, enthusiast, or even smaller businesses that needed a computer but couldn't afford one of IBM's mainframes.

A working group was thus created within IBM to bring a personal computer to market as quickly as possible... which presented a problem. IBM had long prided itself on designing and manufacturing every single part of their computers. That was just "the IBM way". But the working group quickly discovered that designing a brand-new personal computer from scratch would take years. Since IBM management wanted to enter the personal computer market as quickly as possible, designing a brand-new machine was therefore not an option. The new IBM PC was thus designed with off-the-shelf parts to allow the company to start shipping PCs as quickly as possible.

But then another problem surfaced... what operating system would the new IBM PCs use? It can take just as long (usually longer, in fact) to create an operating system than the hardware it runs on, and IBM didn't have the time to create one of their own. So they looked to an outside source. And one of the first places they went was a small Seattle company called Microsoft.

Bill Gates was probably flattered to have IBM executives come see him. After all, IBM was the 800-pound gorilla of the computer industry. But Gates turned them down. At the time, Microsoft dealt almost exclusively in computer languages and tools for programmers. They didn't even have an operating system to sell to IBM, nor were they large enough to create one in a reasonable time frame. Gates thus told IBM to go see a man named Gary Kildall down in California - a man that will probably go down as the biggest loser in IT history.

You see, back in the late 1970s, there were dozens of operating systems out there; some enthusiasts even wrote their own! But of this huge plurality, Kildall's CP/M was king. Gates was probably right to send IBM to Digital Research (Kildall's company), but the IBM executives were in for a rude surprise. The reason(s) why the meeting between IBM and Digital Research went so poorly have never been made quite clear. One story has it that Kildall dissed the "suits from IBM" to fly his vintage Pitts Special biplane. Another story says that Kildall's wife - who was also his business manager - took offense to the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that IBM wanted Digital Research to sign. Yet another story says that Kildall signed the NDA, but simply wasn't enthusiastic about selling or licensing CP/M to IBM.

Whatever the case may be, IBM soon returned to Microsoft. It was at this meeting the IBM revealed that they wouldn't be working with Digital Research and were still looking for an operating system. Steve Ballmer - current Microsoft CEO - then had a flash of inspiration. Ballmer knew that a local computer company - Seattle Computer Products - was building a new computer based on Intel's 8086 chip, and that one of their employees - Tim Paterson - had written an operating system called QDOS - Quick and Dirty Operating System - for it. Ballmer quietly took Gates aside and the two of them decided to play hardball with IBM. They asked for $250,000 in advance and $50 for every copy of "their" operating system that IBM sold on new PCs. IBM agreed - hell, they were so desperate that they were probably happy to have the issue resolved for such a seemingly paltry fee. Microsoft then took $50,000 of IBM's advance and quietly (and quickly) reached a licensing deal with SCP. QDOS was re-branded as Microsoft DOS (MS-DOS) and a technology legend was born.

Mostly. Of course, IBM shipped thousands of MS-DOS based personal computers. But since IBM decided to build the computers out of off-the-shelf parts, many other entrepreneurs wanted to get into the game. The only proprietary part of the IBM PC was the BIOS chip, and three engineers that formerly worked for Texas Instruments - Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto - figured out a way to legally reverse-engineer the chip. Once this was done, they had a PC of their own. Because the two main goals of their new computers were COMPAtibility with IBM machines and overall Quality, they named their company Compaq. And since compatibility with IBM machines was paramount, Compaq too licensed MS-DOS. Between IBM and Compaq, the momentum was there - most any OEM worth his or her salt licensed MS-DOS so their computers would be compatible with IBM and Compaq machines. It didn't matter if the company sold 2 or 2 million computers a year - they all shipped with MS-DOS.

*    *    *

Poor Ashlee Simpson! First the girl gets caught lipsynching on Saturday Night Live. Then - just yesterday - she was the main attraction at a launch party for Skechers shoes in London. Skechers (presumably) paid Simpson megabucks to come onstage and say:

"Skechers is brand that is not afraid to going the beyond. I look forward to representing Skechers clothing line; I also hope to add a few more pairs to my wardrobe."

Read that first sentence again. It's not nearly as bad as Lewis Black's "if it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college" line, but it still makes you wonder... wonder if poor Ashlee has been knocked in the head by Naomi Campbell, who was arrested yet again in London after beating her drug councilor. Perhaps Campbell resorted to violence because she was stressed about the dreaded Vegemite crackdown. Yes, U.S. customs agents have apparently conquered the flow of illegal immigrants, illicit drugs, terrorists and banned weapons into our great land, and have now turned their sights on the Australian delicacy (along with Marmite, its British cousin). Vegemite has long been banned for sale in the US because (get this) "it contains folate, a B vitamin approved as an additive for just a few foods, including breakfast cereals". So you can buy Frosted Flakes (which contains the vitamin), but not Vegemite? Customs has long turned a blind eye to people bringing back small quantities of the "food" for personal use, but are now searching bags for the dreaded spread. THANKS FOR KEEPING US SAFE, U.S. CUSTOMS!

Speaking of safety, "public safety" has long been one of the rationales behind the deployment of so-called "speed cameras" on British highways... you know, those cameras that take a picture of your license plate when you're speeding and send a ticket to your home automatically? Well, some ingenious British drivers noticed what the Home Office is calling a "massive flaw" in the system. In short, one camera takes picture of you at some location (call it "point A"). Another camera then takes another picture of you at another location ("point B"). If the timestamps between the two pictures are too short, then it's obvious to everyone that you've been speeding... right? Well, the cameras have a limited viewing angle, and each camera is pointed at the same lane of traffic. So, by simply changing lanes, British drivers can evade detection and skip the £60 ($112) fine! That's genius at work there!

Lastly for today, some good news\bad news. The good news: Coca Cola is coming out with a new beverage called Enviga that not only has no calories, it claims to actually burn calories! The bad news: the company says that the drink "increases the calorie-burning rate in 'healthy people with a lean-to-normal body type'", which means than you have to be thin already to enjoy the calories-crunching properties of the drink. So - to all the fat-assed people roaming the aisles at Wal Mart hoping to be able to sit on the sofa downing Enviga by the gallon to lose weight... time for plan B!

*    *    *

Website News: I updated the "Up To The Minute" section (below), the "What You Didn't Know About..." section (also below)  and also added an eBook to the Downloads page! Enjoy!

10/31/2006: 1973's The Exorcist shines as one of the scariest movies ever made. And what makes the film so scary (to me) is what it is not. It's not based on some silly "campfire legend" like the characters Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger. It's not based on some highly improbable occurrence, like an alien invasion, nuclear disaster or virus mutation. It's not based on a gimmick (The Blair Witch Project), nor does it have a "lesson" or "moral" that it hits us over the head with (An American Haunting). It doesn't involve characters that are either much larger than life or blatant charactures or stereotypes (The Haunting, Thirteen Ghosts, etc.). How many times have you watched a movie like that and picked out the "order of death" - "OK, there's the black guy, he's absolutely gonna die first... then the stoner guy, then the slut, then the jock... which leaves the pretty (but not too pretty) blonde girl as the lone survivor!"

No, The Exorcist is scary because it goes deep within our collective psyche. It's a primal fear that yes, after all, The Church might have been right. Because after all, how can you believe in the Devil if you don't believe in God? The family in The Exorcist was mostly just like us. Who chose that poor girl to be the battlefield between Good and Evil? Could we be next? And how can you fight an evil that you can't even see or touch? Fighting Jason Voorhees is one thing... but how do you save your daughter from The Devil?

With today being Halloween, I thought I'd do a quick "Spooky History Blog" about my favorite horror movie. Enjoy!

The Exorcist movie is based on a book of the same name by William Peter Blatty. The heart of Blatty's book is based on a real-life exorcism that took place in 1949 in both Cottage City, Maryland and Bel-Nor, Missouri. The facts of this "case" are actually pretty interesting: the boy in question - given the pseudonym "Robbie" - was taken to several doctors, all of whom were stumped by Robbie's case. When science had no answers, the family called in their Lutheran priest, who examined the boy and suggested that the family contact a Catholic priest for possible exorcism. While medical knowledge has grown exponentially in the past sixty years, it's not as if 1949 was the "Dark Ages" as far as medicine was concerned. Modern doctors suspect that "Robbie" was suffering from some form of epilepsy, yet doctors at the time thought he did not suffer from the disease. Most interestingly, "Robbie" is still alive and has never displayed any symptoms of epilepsy since his exorcism.

Once the book was published - and it was a bestseller, by the way - it didn't take long for Hollywood to jump on the bandwagon. The main problem that Hollywood faced making the film was getting someone to direct it. Warner Brothers initially wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct the film, but he turned it down. The studio then approached Arthur Penn (who refused, as he was teaching at Yale at the time), Peter Bogdanovich (who wanted to pursue other projects), Mike Nichols (who didn't want to shoot a film dependent on a child's performance), and John Boorman (who thought that it was "cruel towards children"). The up-and-coming director William Friedkin, who had just made a splash with The French Connection in 1971, was finally chosen to direct.

Warner had no idea of what they were getting into when they hired him. Friedkin kept lots of guns loaded with blanks on the set, and he would either fire them at random to keep tension on the set high, or would fire them when the script called for the actors to look startled. So the look of panic you see on the actor's faces is very real. As is the look on Father Dyer's face when administering last rites to Father Karris. Friedkin had shot the scene several times and wasn't satisfied with the results; he then approached the actor that played Father Dyer (real-life priest William O'Malley) and asked O'Malley if he trusted him. When Father O'Malley said yes, Friedkin slapped him across the face as hard as he could, then yelled "Action!". So the confused look of Father Dyer's face is also very real. Also real is the breath leaving the actors' mouths during the exorcism scenes; Friedkin had the set enclosed and brought in four industrial-strength air conditioners, which brought temperatures on the set to between -30 and -40F (let's just call it -37C). The set was so cold that perspiration would freeze on the cast and crew, and on at least one occasion the air on the set was so saturated with moisture that snow fell on the set, inside a sealed sound stage before filming could begin. Linda Blair - who had to suffer this whilst wearing only a flimsy nightgown - says that she hates being cold to this day, and blames it on this part of the filming. She also blames filming for the chronic back pain she suffers as a result of being violently yanked by crew members whilst she was wearing a harness. Ellen Burstyn also injured her back, and frequently mentions that her scream and facial reaction (after being slapped by Regan) were from genuine pain due to being pulled too hard by a harness.

And let's not forget those special effects! Friedkin didn't think that little Linda Blair could hit Ellen Burstyn hard enough, so an adult body double was used for the actual hit. So poor Ellen was not only yanked by a harness, she was actually hit in the face! And the sounds... remember the sound of Regan's head twisting around? That was actually the sound of a crew member's ancient leather wallet being twisted in front of a microphone. And the sound of the demon leaving Regan's body? A recording of pigs being led to slaughter. The "pea soup" was, in fact, pea soup... but it wasn't Campbell's (the SFX guys found that brand to be too thin). Blair hated vegetables at the time, and the pea soup actually made her throw up! And then there was Mercedes McCambridge, the woman that actually did the "demon voice" for the film. McCambridge reportedly drank raw eggs, whiskey and any number of things - as well as chain smoked and deprived herself of sleep - to get the creepy voice for the movie. Her role was initially completely uncredited, so she sued Warner Brothers to get her name in the credits; this cast a shadow over the Academy Awards, where Linda Blair was nominated for "Best Supporting Actress". Blair's name couldn't be withdrawn once nominated, so the controversy effectively torpedoed Blair's chances.

All in all, the sheer amount of physical effort put into the film is astounding. Take the scene where the exorcist approaches the MacNeil's house (the same shot is used in the film's movie poster). Friedkin wanted the spotlight to originate from one of the windows, yet that window had to appear as a normal window - in other words, Friedkin wanted a bunch of light to come from point A, but he didn't want it to appear as if the light came from point A. It took the crew several days to figure out how to do the shot, then it took 24 hours just to physically set up the lights for the effect. That's dedication, and that's probably the reason that filming in the United States took 224 days instead of the 85 days originally scheduled. And the last scenes of the film - shot on location at the actual archaeological dig at Nineveh in Hatra, Iraq - required the use of a British crew, as the United States didn't have diplomatic relations with Iraq at the time. Amusingly, the crew were only allowed to film if they taught Iraqi filmmakers some advanced film techniques... as well as how to make fake blood!

There were also some... dark things that supposedly happened during the making of the film. Nine people connected with the film allegedly died during filming (false, although two of the actors - Jack MacGowran and Vasiliki Maliaros did, in fact die. MacGowran died as a result of complications from the flu, and Maliaros died of natural causes at age 89). A fire allegedly destroyed one of the sets (false, although a small fire *did* damage one of the sets). Friedkin reportedly was so despondent at one point during the filming that he allegedly asked technical advisor Rev. Thomas Bermingham to exorcise the set (almost certainly false, although Bermingham did, in fact, bless the set, cast and crew).

The real hysteria didn't take off until the film was released. Filmgoers screamed, fainted and occasionally threw up. In fact, people threw up often enough that many theatres began offering "Exorcist barf bags" free of charge. Paramedics were often called to theaters showing the film. One moviegoer who saw the film during its original release fainted and broke his jaw on the seat in front of him; he then sued Warner Brothers and the filmmakers, claiming that the use of subliminal imagery in the film had caused him to pass out. The film was banned in several cities in the UK ; this led some enterprising travel companies to organize "Exorcist Coach Trips" to take groups to the nearest town where the film was showing!

Here's some more Exorcist trivia that I couldn't figure out how to work in to my story:

The scenes showing Father Karras in his room at Georgetown were filmed on the fourth floor of Hughes Hall, Fordham University's freshman residence. Since there was no elevator at the time, the windows had to be removed in order to accommodate for the crane camera. Each year, Father William O'Malley - who still teaches at Fordam - talks about his experience with the movie after students watch it on the same floor where it was filmed.

The language lab scene was filmed in a room in the basement of Keating Hall on Fordham University's Bronx campus. The same room was used as a Pentagon office in Russell Crowe's A Beautiful Mind. In the scene, a white banner is visible with the letters TASUKETE written in red, which means "Help me" in Japanese.

Not only was it difficult in finding a director for the film, it was hard finding a lead actress too: Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine were both asked to play the role, but both turned it down. Audrey Hepburn was also approached, but only agreed to do it if it was filmed in Rome. Anne Bancroft was yet another choice but she was in her first month of pregnancy and was dropped.

The "Exorcist steps", the 75 stone steps at the end of M Street in Georgetown, were padded with 1/2"-thick rubber to film the death of Father Damien Karras. The stuntman tumbled down the stairs twice. Georgetown University students charged people around $5 each to watch the stunt from the rooftops.

After filming was complete, William Friedkin did post-production at a company whose address was 666 Fifth Avenue, NYC.

If adjusted for inflation, this would be the top grossing R-rated film of all time.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

It all came to an end after World War II, though. Exhausted and broke after battling Hitler for so long, Britain could no longer afford the luxury of an overseas empire, and most of the territories held by Britain were eventually given their independence.

Although the Empire began falling apart in the late 1940s, Britain still acted as an Imperial power in many industries until the mid 1960s. In shipbuilding, medical research and aeronautical design the Brits still ruled. In fact, it was the last category - aeronautical design – the Brits were in fact ahead of both the Americans and the Soviets. For on January 22, 1952, the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), the forerunner of British Airways, began the first commercial passenger jet service using the de Havilland Comet jet.

The Comet was a beautiful aircraft. It looks futuristic even day, with its sleek lines and distinctive engines. In training films (where the plane was pushed to its limit), the plane looked more like a jet fighter than the commercial aircraft we’re used to today. The plane was fast, sexy, ahead of its time… and had one major design flaw.

On January 10^th, 1954, BOAC flight 781 took off from Ciampino Airport in Rome en route to London Airport (now known as Heathrow Airport). Takeoff was unexceptional, and the plane rapidly climbed to cruising altitude. Around 15 minutes into the flight, the captain was speaking to the pilot of a BOAC flight heading towards Rome, when the London-bound captain’s transmission ended mid-sentence. After trying unsuccessfully to re-establish communication with the Comet, the pilot of the inbound flight radioed Ciampino to see if they could get in touch with flight 781. They too, were unsuccessful. Little did either know that the plane had already imploded and fallen out of the sky.

Fishermen from the island of Elba saw the many pieces falling into the ocean and rushed out to the crash site to see if anyone had survived. No one had, and so the fishermen instead began hauling bodies from the water. 15 bodies were recovered in all, and these were taken to a chapel in the town of Porto Azzurro in Elba to await autopsy. Dr. Antony Fenari performed said autopsies, and almost immediately he noticed something strange about the victims. Many had suffered broken bones on impact with the water, which is not altogether surprising. What was surprising was that many of the bodies showed signs of skull injuries… injuries that occurred while the victims were still alive. Additionally, the lungs of almost every victim were incredibly damaged, in some cases reduced to “goo”.

Although the British initially though that sabotage was cause of the crash, Fenari could find no signs of an explosion on any of the bodies. So sabotage was out. And since the wreckage of the plane was lying on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, British investigators had almost nothing to go on. So Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the Comet fleet grounded and also took the unprecedented step of ordering the Royal Navy to “endeavour to locate and salve Comet”.

It was a task easier said than done. In the age before transponders and GPS units, the Royal Navy had only the roughest idea of where flight 781 hit the water. The winter weather also seemed to do everything it could to hamper the investigation. It was very slow going, even though the navy was using cutting-edge (for the time) technology in the search. In the meantime, the grounded Comets were costing BOAC thousands of pounds a week. With the airline hemorrhaging money and the Royal Navy’s search still inconclusive, the British government felt that it had no choice but to allow the Comets to fly again. On March 23 – just ten weeks after the crash – the ban on the Comets was lifted. It would be a fatal mistake.

Newsreel and television cameras rolled as the first post-grounding flight prepared for takeoff from London Airport. BOAC chairman Sir Miles Thomas was even on hand, and he told reporters that

We obviously wouldn’t be flying the Comet with passengers… were we not wholly satisfied that the conditions are acceptable for carrying passengers anywhere in the world.

On April 8^th, a Comet left London for Rome, then Cairo en route to its final destination in Johannesburg, South Africa. The plane took off from Rome without incident. 33 minutes into the flight, the pilot radioed the tower that everything was normal. Minutes later, flight 201 fell out of the sky in almost exactly the same manner as flight 781. And again, the Royal Navy was called to recover any wreckage they could.

Churchill took swift action. He again ordered the Comet fleet grounded and also ordered the Royal Aircraft Establishment to investigate the crashes. Sir Arnold Hall, a Cambridge educated aerospace engineer, was to head the investigation. Churchill told Hall that “the cost of solving the Comet mystery must not be reckoned in money or in manpower” – essentially giving Hall unlimited funding and scope for the task, something rare in post-war Britain.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate Sir Albert’s genius. You must remember that this was the first full-scale investigation of a jet airplane crash. Flight data recorders didn’t exist yet, and neither did the science of aircraft metallurgy or the techniques of rebuilding downed airplanes. And Hall was given this Herculean task in the pre-computer age; instead of electron microscopes and super computers, all Hall had were chalkboards and slide rules.

Hall ordered all of the recovered wreckage to a hanger at Farnborough, where he began reconstructing the aircraft. In doing this, he noticed that many bits of debris from the front of the plane ended up in the rear of the jet, thus indicating that whatever had happened happened at the front of the plane. Around this time, the autopsy reports came in for flight 201. The five recovered bodies all showed injuries strikingly similar to those of flight 781. All of this led Hall to wonder if the entire plane had simply exploded due to decompression. He built a scale model of the aircraft inside a pressure chamber… and when he pressurized the model, it exploded into a million pieces.

Hall decided that he was on to something, and he next had a huge water tank built. The tank was around 112 feet long, 22 feet wide and 16 feet deep – big enough to fit an actual Comet jet (there were sealed holes in the tank to allow for the wings). He then filled the tank with water, and then filled the plane with more water (so that the cabin was effectively pressurized). After five minutes, the excess water was released from inside the plane, and the process is repeated over and over again, all day, every day. Hall himself thought that the test might have to run for six months or more to get results.

He needn’t have worried. After just three weeks of testing, the Comet ripped apart in the water tank.  Although de Havilland’s engineers had asserted that the plane could easily handle 10,000 or more flights, the test plane failed catastrophically after just 3,000 simulated flights. Hall had the tank drained, and the results were even worse than he imagined: there were massive tears in the plane’s aluminum skin, especially around the windows, doors, and other stress points. It was convincing, but it wasn’t enough to say for certain what the cause of the crash was.

This is where sheer luck enters the story. Hall's other engineers were rebuilding the failed planes in the hanger, and although they knew that they plane had exploded due to decompression, they couldn’t exactly say why. It was at this point that an Italian fisherman snagged a huge piece of wreckage in his net. This piece in particular was from the roof of the plane, where two windows were mounted to allow for long range radio reception. And it was in this wreckage that Hall found what he was looking for – absolute signs of metal fatigue where the windows had been riveted in the roof. Although the de Havilland engineers had designed all windows to be glued into place, they were riveted into place by the manufacturing arm of the company. Tiny cracks almost instantly appeared around the rivets, and after several flights the cracks got longer and longer… until failure was inevitable. Once this became known, de Havilland made major changes to the Comet design and construction. Several new versions of the Comet were designed and produced.

But it was too late. Boeing had already taken an insurmountable lead in the manufacture of passenger jets, and British aircraft manufacturers simply couldn’t compete. BOAC itself ordered 15 Boeing 707 aircraft in 1956. Although patriotism compelled the company to switch to British-made Vickers VC-10 planes, BOAC stuck to its guns and flew both planes. Eventually, the VC-10 planes would be taken out of service for Boeing’s 747-400 jets. Eventually, all British aircraft companies were bought, sold or merged into companies that specialized in defense contracts. Although many aircraft components are still manufactured in the UK today (Rolls Royce aircraft engines for example), the overall production of aircraft in the UK was destroyed… by a Comet.

How The Writing Gets Done.

You might think that writing short articles like these is pretty easy. In a way, it is. I know a lot about history and am always on the lookout for new and groovy things to tell you about. But just knowing a story and being able to bring it to a mass audience are two different things. I can “know” something and tell the missus all about it; to do that, I don’t need a lot of names, dates and places – I just need the gist of the story. However, to tell the world about something you have to provide specifics. And this is where things get complicated.

Take the above story, for instance. My main inspiration for the story came from an episode of the British version of Seconds From Disaster (which is also popular on the National Geographic Channel here in the US). I also consulted Wikipedia and various other online sources. One “fact” in particular stuck out at me – the fact that the TV show and every written source I could find stated that flight 781 was “en route from Rome to Heathrow Airport”. That didn’t seem right to me. I knew that Heathrow was originally called “London Airport”, but I had no idea when the name was officially changed to “London Heathrow Airport”. You’d think that finding out when the name change happened would be pretty easy… but you’d be wrong.

The Wikipedia article on Heathrow mentions nothing about the history of the name, and neither does BAA’s site (the British Airports Authority is the company that owns Heathrow, as well as Gatwick, Standstead, and other major British airports). I next found a site that detailed an extensive history of the site that became Heathrow; while it could tell me what was on the land in the year 1235, it couldn’t tell me when the name change happened. I was finally able to track down something at this BBC “Today in History” site. Apparently the Queen opened a new terminal on December 16, 1955 and was quoted as saying that in doing so, she marked an “important stage in the story of London Airport”. There are a few other direct quotes from the Queen from that day that refer to “London Airport”, so at the time of the crashes, the Comets were either going to, or coming from, “London Airport”. (It appears that sometime shortly after the Queen’s speech that the name was changed to Heathrow). The rough amount of time it took me to find this out: 40 minutes.

It’s little things like this that can throw you off your rhythm. I was having a rough time getting this article off the ground (haha!) and the “Heathrow question” didn’t help a bit. It’s little factoids like these that can take forever to get to the bottom of. I know that a pope gave Henry VIII the title fidei defensor (“Defender of the Faith”) for Henry’s book, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (“The Defence of the Seven Sacraments”), which defended Catholicism against Martin Luther. But which pope gave him that title? And when? On what date did he bestow the honor to Henry? The best I can find out is that Pope Leo X gave Henry the title in October of 1521. Good luck if you can find the actual date… Lord knows I gave up a long time ago!

11/10/2006: Ever heard of the "Romantic Movement"? It didn't have anything to do with bringing home roses and chocolates for the missus; indeed it didn't have anything to do with what we think of as "romance" at all. Wikipedia says that it was "an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe". It was partly "a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period", but it was also (and more importantly) "a reaction against the rationalization of nature".

There were two major scientific advances that led to the birth of the movement:

The first was medical science (and science in general), in that it seemed that scientists of the day were creeping ever closer to discovering the true "essence" of life. Whatever you want to call it - Life Force, Primal Essence, you name it - it seemed as if scientists of the day were mere inches from figuring out what that thing was and the Romantics feared that all manner of Bad Things would happen once Pandora's Box was opened. One of the most famous pieces of Romantic literature - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - deals with this question directly: a "mad scientist" type figures out how to harness the power of life and uses his skills to create a monster. You probably know the rest of the story. In any case, Mary Shelley's fear is hardly unknown to us. In fact, such fear may be even more prevalent today than it was two hundred years ago. It seems that medical science - with its DNA and stem cell research - might again be on the cusp of "harnessing life". And it scares people now just as much as it did then.

The other scientific advance that kicked off the Romantic Movement was the Industrial Revolution. For centuries, people made things with their hands. But suddenly, factories were popping up all over Europe, factories that could do the work of thousands of people using machines that didn't require wages or sleep. People had a real fear of technology - much like people in the 1960s and 1970s that feared that computers would take over their jobs. In fact, the fear of technology was so great that a political movement took root in England that went from factory to factory smashing up the machines. The movement made such an impression that to this day "Luddite" is a pejorative term for someone that has a (real or imagined) fear of technology.

Now, the astute reader might have noticed something interesting about the two causes of the Romantic Movement, and that is that both medical science and the Industrial Revolution didn't happen overnight. It wasn't like Europeans knew nothing about medical science and one day suddenly knew (what they thought was) everything they needed to know about the human body. And factories didn't pop up all over England, France and Germany overnight, either. Just as say, AIDS research has moved at a snail's pace to us in the 21st century, so too did medical and industrial science in the late 18th century in Europe. Some specific event in particular must have happened to kick off the Romantic Movement.

That thing was the publication in 1762 of Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with Several Other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic Language, by the Scotsman James Macpherson. Ossian was a third-century Celt who belonged to an ancient tribe of warrior-kings. He was the son of Fingal, who himself was the son of Cumhal (leader of the fianna) and Muirne, daughter of the Druid Tadg mac Nuadat who lived on the hill of Almu in County Kildare. Fingal was left in the care of Muirme's sister and a warrior woman named Liath Luachra. Both women mentored Fingal, in much the same manner that Merlin mentored King Arthur. An epic series of events follows in the book, and the tales captured the imagination of every thinker in Europe.

Only there was one problem: the poems were an elaborate forgery. Macpherson had simply traveled around Scotland collecting ancient Celtic legends and tales. Had he simply collected these and published a book of them... well, that would be one thing. But Macpherson decided instead to weave the tales all together and claim that Ossian had, in fact, existed... which is something else entirely. Almost immediately, controversy erupted in England and Ireland, with the English claiming that they were straight-up forgeries, and the Irish claiming that the tales were "stolen" from their mythology. Although the authenticity debate raged for some time (even into the 20th century!), that didn't keep those who would become Romantics from eagerly accepting the stories as an authentic history of man in his more "noble state". Even Thomas Jefferson was hoodwinked - the future President of the United States once called Ossian "the greatest poet that ever existed!"

So one of the greatest movements in political, social, artistic and musical history was kicked off... by a forgery!

11/30/2006: BREAKING NEWS! I'm sure you've probably heard about this already, but in case you haven't, you might wanna jump on this ASAP:

Microsoft is giving away FREE copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 *if* you're willing to sit through three webcasts (each) about their new products. All you have to do is sign up here and watch the 'casts... fully licensed copies of Vista or Office should be on their way to you "within 6-8 weeks of the product's release to manufacturing". No shipping and handling charges, nothing! Although the offer "expires on February 28th, 2007", the site also says that "supplies are limited", so you might want to register ASAP. In fact, the site's been so slammed that it took me several hours to sign up at the site today!

There are a couple of potential "gotchas":

First, you have to have a business address. Those of you that can get mail at work should simply enter your occupation as "IT Staff" and give your normal work address. Those of you that don't work (or can't get mail at work) can "start a consulting business" and get the software sent to your home.

Secondly, the site being so slammed makes me worry a bit. Since Microsoft is running this promotion until 02/28/07, you'd think that they'd planned to give away a lot of software. But the site's been SO BUSY today that I'm worried that a) the promotion will run out before I can watch the 'casts (especially since the site's so unresponsive), or b) they'll keep the promotion open, but close new registrations, so by the time you read this it could all be over already. At the very least, register for the site NOW and hopefully in a day or two traffic will calm down and you can watch the webcasts.

And lest you think I'm making this up, Engadget reported it (read this), as has Neowin (read this) and DownloadSquad (read this).

12/02/2006: Well, THAT didn't take long! Microsoft's "Free Vista and Office" offer is now officially closed to new registrations. As I guessed the other day, Microsoft have simply closed new registrations; if you were able to register for Vista or Office (or both), you will still have 30 days to watch the 3 webcasts before the offer expires. If you hadn't heard about any of this until now... sorry - you missed out!

12/16/2006: The Office is absolutely, positively the funniest show on television these days. The humor is both in-your-face as well as subtle, and we genuinely feel for the cast. It's almost as if you know them personally. Being the great purveyor of trivia that I am, I thought you guys might enjoy some random Office trivia:

The scenes of Scranton shown during the opening theme were filmed by... John Krasinski! Krasinski and a couple of his friends drove around Scranton and filmed the town through the car's sunroof!

Most of the Scranton restaurants and attractions mentioned in the show are real. The Lackawanna Coal Mining Tour, Poor Richard's Pub, Farley's, Connell Park, Carbondale, Dickson City, Lake Wallenpaupack, The Mall at Steamtown, radio station Rock 107, the Montage Mountain Performing Arts Center, Bishop O'Hara High School, and the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins hockey team all exist. The "Froggy -101" bumper sticker on Dwight's file cabinet is an actual sticker for a Scranton area radio station, and the bobble head dolls on his desk were giveaways from the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons baseball team.

The "Creed Bratton" character is played by... Creed Bratton! Bratton was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and grew up in Coarsegold, CA. During the 1960s, he played guitar for the popular rock band The Grass Roots. Creed (the character) mentions being a member of the band in one of the show's "talking head" segments, and has played guitar solos on the show. Most recently - in the "Benihana Christmas" episode - he was shown singing karaoke to "Beatin' Round the Bush" - one of his own songs! In many aspects, his character is a parody of his own life (for instance, his "I had a lot of sex in the '60s" comment).

B.J. Novak (Ryan), Paul Lieberstein (Toby), Mindy Kaling (Kelly) and Michael Schur (Mose, Dwight's cousin at the beet farm) were the show's original writers. Since then three additional writers have been hired.

Jenna Fischer has repeatedly said that she works on her MySpace blog whilst sitting at her desk during filming. If you watch the show and see her typing something into her computer, it's probably her blog! Other cast members have admitted to checking their email and surfing the 'Net when their characters are in the background.

Unlike many "mockumentary" shows, The Office is heavily scripted. Most every line, look and wink are there in the script, but that doesn't mean that there's no improvisation. The most memorable thing about season 3's opening episode - "Gay Witch Hunt" - was the scene where Michael kissed Oscar to show that he was "OK" with gay people. The kiss (which was so painful to watch) was completely improvised by Steve Carell. According to Jenna Fischer, "those looks of shock/giddiness/confusion on our faces are REAL. We were all on the edge of our seats wondering what would happen next. I can't believe we held it together for as long as we did. I'm not sure we've ever laughed so hard on set". Sometimes goofs are even kept in - for example, in a recent episode Angela's eyes were moving all over the place during a "talking head" segment. The scene ended with her asking what the "deal with the flies in here" was. There were, in fact, flies bothering her during the filming of that scene.

Most episodes of the show start with the sound of a telephone ringing.

The "diploma" on the wall of Michael Scott's office (often seen during his "talking head" segments) is actually a "Certificate of Ownership" for a Seiko watch. Thank you, high definition TV!

Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) is currently dating Karen Filippelli (Rashida Jones). Interestingly, Krasinski and Jones actually dated in the past, but broke up some time ago.

Speaking of love, Carol (Michael's realtor and now ex-girlfriend) is also his real-life wife.

In the "Diwali" episode, Mindy Kaling's parents were played by her real-life parents!

Some firsts: The Office was the first NBC comedy series to be presented in widescreen to non-HDTV viewers. In 2006, the show became the first "remake" series ever in winning the Outstanding Comedy award at the Emmys.

Paying homage: Dunder Mifflin's address is 1725 Slough Avenue, the same as the original British show. The Union Flag on Michael's desk is also in honor of the original show. The shots of the water cooler and copier seen during the theme song were taken directly from the opening of the British series.

*    *    *

Things might seem quiet around here, but I've been doing occasional updates that I just haven't mentioned here on the front page. I added a couple dozen new links to the Links page, a few new recipes to the Recipes page, added a few things to the British English Glossary, updated some links on the British Shows Worth Watching page, overhauled the Slipstream Guide, made more pages work better with Firefox and also updated the Useless Fact!

12/22/2006: I wanted to write up a History Blog piece about the Christmas Truce of WWI, but I simply ran out of time! So your homework is to read the Wikipedia entry and write up a 500 word essay about it... Just kidding - MERRY CHRISTMAS!