Well it was only a matter of time before I got this spam. Maybe this is how they're funding the rebuilding: merchandising.

Get the Iraqi 'Most-Wanted' Deck of Playing Cards--Only $5.95 a Set!

You've seen these cards on the nightly news. They've been featured in newspapers worldwide. Now you can own the one true collector's item from Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is the same 55-card deck given to Coalition soldiers featuring the Iraq's 52 "Most-Wanted" leaders.

And here's a real selling point.

This deck is printed by the same company supplying these cards to the US Embassy in Kuwait. This is a real, usable deck of playing cards, printed on casino-quality stock. Don't be fooled by imitations!

You may recall how about a month ago, two men were arrested for "placing threatening letters" around Sturgis, MI. I guess everyone under 30 has seen the video that inspired this act, but I hadn't. Watching it, made the criminals seem so much cooler and the law... so much stupider.

Raiders Recount: Silver and Black actually won the Superbowl

I thought this was funny. But then, I'm a Raiders fan.

This is one of those days when the War on Terror seems to be cracking down on everyone but terrorists. Other than journalists (below), we've been cracking down on cruise ship passangers, protesters, dyslexic pilots, the mail in general, and cooks.

If you've ever wondered how corporate media censors itself, here's a great example of how it works. MSNBC correspondent Ashley Banfield criticizes the networks for glorifying the war in Iraq

Sources said [NBC News President Neil] Shapiro "bawled her out" for what were perceived as criticisms over the war coverage of all of the networks, including NBC and MSNBC.

In her speech, Banfield said the networks had portrayed the Iraqi war as "glorious and wonderful" because they had failed to show the bloody horrors of the battles.

Sounds like a reasonable criticism to me, but NBC News couldn't stomach it.

Interestingly, there's a factual error in the Reuters story reporting on this.

It says

Correspondents who have returned from the front have all raved about the embedding system that placed them with troops as well as the overall network coverage of the war.

This is not true. If you read this, George C. Wilson (who was an embedded reporter for The National Journal) clearly had some problems with embedding. He is definitely not "raving" about it. He says:

in effect I was putting myself in a position to be a propagandist, which was great for the Pentagon, but not so great for the readers.

By the way, Ashley Banfield is a Canadian.

Now we're starting to learn the real cost of the War on Terror. What if Saddam Hussen had devised some way to prevent 1.7 million Americans from receiving health insurance? We'd probably call that a weapon of mass destruction.

And of course, when we do provide health coverage, this means we're just doing it in the most inefficient, expensive, and humiliating way possible.

Christopher J. Durovich, president of Children's Medical Center in Dallas, said: "The cuts mean that more kids will seek primary care in our emergency room, which is already overburdened. We would try to offset those cuts and the burden of uncompensated care by seeking higher reimbursement from commercial insurers."

Styx Backs Out of TO

Though my sister delivered her baby in a hospital outside of Toronto that was crawling with GIs, and though the WHO has warned against travelling to Toronto, I didn't realize how big this SARS outbreak was until I read this.

The outbreak has also forced Styx, the Notwist, and Lisa Marie Presley to cancel Toronto appearances.

Here's my press release of the day.

Sophos to Present at Real World Linux 2003
Leading Corporate Anti-Virus Vendor to Discuss "Securing Your Linux Environment" at Real World Linux Conference

What:
Sophos, a world leader in anti-virus protection for businesses, today announced that Chris Wraight, technology consultant at Sophos, will present at this year's Real World Linux conference on April 29th in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Now don't call me sexist, but what's the difference between 8 Mile and Purple Rain?

Tech book publisher O'Reilly is adopting a new, saner copyright policy for its books.

Developed by Creative Commons, the Founders' Copyright is a legal option that allows copyright holders to voluntarily release their works to the public after the period envisioned in the original 1790 US copyright law--14 years, with the option of one 14-year extension.

Nine Years Ago Today

Happy anniversary, my love.

Yesterday was Dyngus Day. Now that's my type of holiday:

On this day in Polish tradition, boys soak girls with water on the day after Easter.

I think the other part of the tradition is that the girls then chase the boys around with brooms and try and beat them.

This can't be the most popular soft drink in Taiwan right now. And yes, it is a real soft drink.

Want to get creeped out? Type your phone number into Google. This only seems to work with US numbers, by the way.

RIP Nina Simone

Clifton Henderson, who was at Simone's bedside at her death, said she died of "natural causes" in her sleep after a long illness. She was 70.

One of These Folks is Not Like the Others

If you know my buddy Carl Strolle, and wonder what he's up to, check out these photos from his life in Senegal on his Web site. Unfortunately, there's no commentary, so the photos pretty much have to speak for themselves.

The Trial of David Foster Wallace for Crimes Against Literature

Evidence for the Prosecution #1: Abuse of aphorism. On why Canadians eat later than Americans:

Cultured Canadians tend to think vertical digestion makes the mind unkeen

--Infinite Jest

Major life change alert

I just took a job as reporter with the IDG News Service. This means I need to master the arcane subtleties of regular bathing and wardrobe rotation.

Linux Magazine came up with a really compelling counteroffer when they heard I was thinking of this job, which complicated things. I've been on the masthead there for four years -- since issue #3 -- and it hurt like hell to say goodbye.

But it was time for a change, and I'm really psyched about this new job at my old company.

Speaking of Bowlerama, check out the new and updated Bowlerama page on Filbert.net. Anna has spent countless hours (and downed countless beers) crafting this really wonderful work of top art.



Click on image to see Bowlerama

I don't usually comment on what searches drive people to Filbert.net (a lot of have to do with streaking), but I couldn't pass this one up. If you do a Google search for "Osama Bowlerama", Filbert is the only thing that comes up, baby. I wonder if Carnivore or those Canadian bowling chain lawyers are on to me yet?

As one blogger to another, I bid you adieu, Jack.

I guess it's better to burn out than to blog away.

You'll be back...

Happy 60th birthday LSD-25!

Here's an account of the first ever acid trip.

Last Friday, April 16, 1943, I was forced to stop my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and to go home, as I was seized by a peculiar restlessness associated with a sensation of mild dizziness. On arriving home, I lay down and sank into a kind of drunkenness which was not unpleasant and which was characterized by extreme activity of imagination. As I lay in a dazed condition with my eyes closed (I experienced daylight as disagreeably bright) there surged upon me an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors. This condition gradually passed off after about two hours.

More Yes Men News.

Anti-capitalist activists have drawn the wrath of Wal-Mart by setting up a website that encourages people to "name their own prices" by offering hundreds of substitute bar code labels that can be slapped on store items.

A Literary Walter Gropius?

I'm honestly reading Infinite Jest again. I put it down a few months ago to rest my dissatisfied head. It was when Wallace started writing about an area I understood (technology) that his relentless use of jargon began to seem completely phony and deceptive. I'm in awe of David Foster Wallace as a writer, but sometimes I seriously want to throw this book at the wall, for all it asks of me. And let me be clear, I'm not angry because I'm being asked so much, but because it seems so un-necessary. The book sometimes feels like a child's drawing -- an overwrought totem of everything imaginable, drawn in kaleidoscopic excess with every single shade in that Crayola 96-pack.

I don't think it's enought to write something just because you can. I expect more. Or, rather, I expect less.

As Jonathan Franzen wrote in the New Yorker last fall:

To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn't eat yourself, to build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn't want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer. This is the ultimate breach of contract.

You've got to consider yourself warned when the dust jacket claims the book is "surprisingly readable." What do we expect of our books, if not readability?

Wow. Blogger fixed my template.

Are we really living in dangerous times? Three thousand people died in the attack on the World Trade Center, and maybe another three thousand in Iraq, but in the last ten years, your chances of being killed in an act of terror or the terror of retribution were pretty small.

Watching Karaabi's comments on MAD, I've been thinking about how completely, insanely terrifying the Cold War really was. To think of all the people who, through the years, held their fingers on the nuclear trigger and how close we came to exterminating the planet. To me, that's still much more terrifying than what's going on today.

Check this out. In 1979:

Launch control centers for Minuteman missiles, buried deep below the prairie grass in the American West, received preliminary warning that the United States was under a massive nuclear attack.

The alert did not stop with the U.S. ICBM force. The entire continental air defense interceptor force was put on alert, and at least 10 fighters took off. Furthermore, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, the president's "doomsday plane," was also launched, but without the president on board. It was later determined that a realistic training tape had been inadvertently inserted into the computer running the nation's early-warning programs.

For all of you bloggers out there with Template problems. Apparently Blogger screwed things up around April 1st, and then restored everyone's template from archives. This means that you quite possibly have an old, archived version of your template right now rather than the current. To fix things, you can either redo your template, or create an issue at Blogger Control, and maybe they'll restore your most recent template.

I wouldn't hold my breath though, Blogger Control still hasn't responded to the problem I reported there on February 15.

By the way, I'm completely unable to update my template right now. It sounds like we are all having some kind of weirdness in this domain.

Here's today's political dream.

Each of the thirteen Illuminati bloodline families operates a Council of Thirteen. The Illuminati High Council of the United States is domiciled in Southern California; in July, 2001, the writer learned via sources associated with the High Council, that the head of the Council and an aide, were involved in the abduction of Chandra Levy.

According to investigative journalist Sherman Skolnick, Chandra Levy and Monica Lewinsky were Mossad intelligence operatives, who were assigned to sexually compromise political figures. According to an informant who is a member of Britain’s Wessex Lodge, which is a satanic sub-cult of the Illuminati, and also is the overlord of the notorius Skull and Bones cult, which spawns major American political figures, Monica Lewinsky was programmed by an Australian member of the Wessex Lodge.

The amazing thing is how much pseudoscience and crackpot theorizing this guy's managed to weave into one tale -- could you imagine how tripped out you'd be if you actually believed this? He must never ever sleep at night. It's unfortunate, however, that he missed the whole OJ connection. That's the key to the whole puzzle.

Another political dream.

I woke up this morning in the midst of subconscious contemplation about Iraq. How very third-millenium of me. I was thinking about church and state and what specific aspects of Bushdom... er, freedom we may end up bringing to Iraq as we embark on our pipeline.... er, nation-building phase there.

As is often the case with prophetic dreams, last night's visions were inspired by a couple of rented videos. The first, Uncle Saddam, was a hard row to hoe. Billed as "Intriguing and bizarre... paints Saddam as the genocidal Jerry Seinfeld," this documentary allegedly has dialogue written by the Kids in the Hall's Scott Thompson. I say "allegedly" because it was hard for me to imagine Thompson having anything to do with this amateurish and decidedly un-funny film (Winner: Best Documentary, Northampton Film Festival). Of course, after turning the film off in disgust half way through, who should I see on CBS's Touched by an Angel (Contender: Worst Show Ever, McMillan TV Festival) than Mr. Thompson himself? I don't know if you've ever watched this show, but here is some typical dialogue.

Guy who plays Neelix in Star Trek Voyager: I loved playing Peter Pan as a kid and that dude who founded this theatre once started writing a really great song, but died before he could finish it.

Touched by an Angel Chick: But the important thing is that his spirit is alive. He taught me the song in Eternity this morning. It goes like this. (singing) I've been touched by an angel. Touched by an angel. I was afraid, but now I know... etc, etc...

What a load of crap, but it's nothing like the mountain of crap that Michael Caine and Omar Sharif find themselves buried under in The Last Valley, the other movie Anna and I watched. Set during the later part of the Thirty Years War, the film is about a gang of roving mercenaries, led by a nameless Michael Caine, who spend their time sacking villages and fighting for whomever seems to be winning the war. Caine's whole role, as Captain of the unit, is to balance the religious tensions within his group (some are Catholics; some Protestants) and to keep them focused on survival rather than killing each other. The Captain has one cardinal rule: religious disputes between the ranks will not be tolerated, but by the end of the film religious interference in the governance of the valley has completely fucked everything up.

Then the Captain realizes that war is returning.

He decides to switch sides, and support the Protestants, because they have the best chance of winning. When the Valley's Catholic priest chastises him for no longer fighting the "just war" of Emperor Maximillian, the Captain looses it. He screams at the priest, "There is no just war.... the truth is your war is filth, greed and hypocrisy. And the other side is just as rotten." The priest tells him he'll go to hell, and Caine finally shows his own religious hand, yelling back, "There is no Hell. Don't you understand? Because there is no god... it is a legend."

What a bloody, ugly, stupid enterprise for humankind.

The Thirty Years war was a pan-European power grab started by the fact that the Protestants felt that the Catholics had too much control of the political machinery in Germany. Though the Bush government fails to appreciate this, I think that events like the Thirty Years War were very much on the minds of the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and that any attempt to raise the structures of democracy in Iraq will need to be buttressed with this principle.

But in many Muslim countries, the average man on the street probably wants protection from secularism as much as from religious domination. As Karen Armstrong points out Muslims have a long history of secular repression -- everything from democratic elections being overturned by the British in Egypt to the Shah of Iran firing on citizens protesting a compulsory western dress code.

My ideology suggests that freedom and the rule of law, if properly enforced, can overcome these kinds of problems, but my experience with democracy in action suggests that when the chips are down, people will almost always act in self-interest. The trick is to convince them that garroting the Sunni next door isn't always in their own self-interest and that sometimes by giving a little, a lot can be gained.

It's a boy!

My first nephew, Noah Cameron McMillan was born by caeserian section at 3:50 pm in Barrie Canada today.

Congratulations Kathy! Now get some sleep.

Got an email from my mom about my sister Kathy this morning. Kathy is nine months pregnant with my first niece or nephew (ultrasound says it'll be a boy; hence "Noah." If it's a girl, my vote is for "Trucker.")


hi
It is 5:45 am. Just took Kathy and Kelly to the hospital. Hope Noah comes quickly.
Will keep you informed
love
MOM

Apparently, she's been in labor since 11:30 pm last night.

Reagan isn't even dead and they've already named at least one airport after him. But according to a dream I had last night even bigger things are being planned to honor the Bushes.

In my dream, they changed American Standard English to honor the Bushes. The word "free" became "bush." So instead of "freedom fries,' we had "bushdom fries."

So Bush's State of the Union would say things like:

...whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men -- Bush people will set the course of history.

All Bush nations have a stake in preventing sudden and catastrophic attacks. And we're asking them to join us, and many are doing so.


And so on.

I woke up rubbing my eyes and trying to remember more. "They changed "bush" to mean "free," but what, then, would mean "bush?"

I think the answer was "reagan."

Welcome to the new kid on the blog, Laura Denham.

So which of my crackpot ideas should I submit to the Immortalizer Technologies project?

The war is over!

Let the trademarking begin!

Japanese electronics giant Sony has taken an extraordinary step to cash in on the war in Iraq by patenting the term "Shock and Awe" for a computer game.

I wonder if "Mother of..." is still available?

Last Friday, as Anna and I were buying some beer at Coit Liquor, the clerk there noticed we had rented the DVD Dogma and he told us how much he had liked the film. "Really funny stuff," he said.

Breaking out of my normal introversion, I asked him his thoughts on the film that I had picked, Dude, where's my car.

"I saw the trailer for that," he explained diplomatically. "By the time I get to the end of a movie like that, I always end up thinking, 'Man, those two hours are gone from my life forever. I'll never get them back.'"

I gamely defended the film, explaining that I expected it to be in the same category as Road Trip or The Naked Gun.

Two hours letter, I sat in front of the Dude... credits wondering if there wasn't some way I could get those two hours back.

But today, I learned that there were darker forces at work. This Wired story on Hollywood electronic bulletin boards explains:

"If I wanted to get back at an agent who screwed me on something, I could put on the board that my studio is passing on their script. That would pretty much kill the heat on the project.

"Likewise, maybe as a favor to an agent, I could post something like, 'I love this, my boss loves it.' That will create buzz, and quite possibly people will start bidding preemptively because they're afraid of losing the project."

Movie titles flash before my eyes: Bubble Boy. Kangaroo Jack. Dude, Where's My Car?

If you want to know about how the Hollywood herd squelches anything interesting or original, this story makes an interesting read.

And the War on Terror continues. Osama remains free. We're in Iraq, and the terrorists...?

Yemeni authorities were hunting for 10 of the main suspects in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole after they escaped from prison Friday, officials said.

Is our time becoming less valuable? The amount of people willing to pay $10,000 for three hours seems to be dwindling. Or maybe supersonic air travel is just way scarier than it used to be.

Concorde, the world's first supersonic passenger jet, will be grounded in the autumn after a plunge in passenger numbers and a string of high-profile technical problems.

Since it seems to be my job here to ask the annoying questions and since the administration is now starting to crow about its success in Iraq, let me say just this.

Let us not allow the blush of victory to obscure our stated reasons for invading Iraq. On March 19, the White House justified the invasion thusly:

The Iraqi regime continues to conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. It has used weapons of mass destruction. It has a history of reckless aggression and a deep hatred for America and our friends. And it has aided terrorists, including al-Qaida. Using chemical, biological, or one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, terrorists could kill thousands, or more.

So either Saddam is about to use these weapons, or -- with his back against the wall -- he's decided not to use them, or our whole justification for being in Iraq was false.

Ok, enough already with the images of Saddam's effigy being toppled. Thusfar, I've seen his face shot up, ripped out, his body broken and limbs cast asunder. I've seen him in quadruplicate and heard enough comparisons to Hitler and Stalin to make me wonder if there isn't some sort of Boys of Brazil axis (hi Melle!) being played out here.

But it still doesn't make Saddam dead, and I'm getting tired of media make-believe. Please show me his head on a stick, so we can be done with all of this.

Catching up on my New York Times Magazine reading from the last month, I came across This interesting story on Mel Gibson's church near Malibu.

Now I've always held that Mel Gibson was a talentless mannequin of an actor, but according to this story he's much more than that. In fact, he appears to be a second-generation Jew-hating nutter.

Here are a few pearls from his father, Hutton Gibson:

The next day after church, over a plate of roast beef at a buffet joint off the highway, conversation turned to the events of Sept. 11. Hutton flatly rejected that Al Qaeda hijackers had anything to do with the attacks. ''Anybody can put out a passenger list,'' he said.

So what happened? ''They were crashed by remote control,'' he replied.

He moved on to the Holocaust, dismissing historical accounts that six million Jews were exterminated. ''Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,'' he said. ''It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?''

And the son? Apparently he's spending $25 million of his own money on a Latin & Aramaic film about the life, death, and encore of Christ that features the Saviour getting beaten to a bloody pulp by -- you guessed it -- the Jews!

In his conversation with Bill O'Reilly (who prefaced the interview by disclosing that Gibson's production company has optioned the rights to O'Reilly's mystery novel), Gibson was asked whether his account might particularly upset Jews. ''It may,'' he said. ''It's not meant to. I think it's meant to just tell the truth. I want to be as truthful as possible. But when you look at the reasons why Christ came, why he was crucified -- he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind. So that, really, anyone who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.''

George McGovern takes on the question that's been bugging me most: Why?

Unfortunately, like most of the criticism I've read, this article seems to think that a catalog of the Administration's sins is equal to an answer to the "why?" question. It's not.

Though I honestly haven't discovered a single person in the US who supports this war, there are indications (Methodology? Questions asked? Don't expect that from newspaper reports on public opinion polls) that the majority of the US does support what's going on in Iraq.

This makes me think that the public probably has an intuitive understanding of why this war is happening -- and perhaps a better grasp on things than even so learned and articulate a pundit as George McGovern, who'd have my vote, if he were running for president (and was about 20 years younger). We are fighting this war because we are intolerant and we want the world to know that. This is, I believe, what Americans are responding to: a sense that America is standing up for itself and causing the world to respect its might. Success in this war emphasizes our mightiness. Failure undermines it.

We already control the Arabian Peninsula. Saddam was a minor threat, already held in check by UN inspectors. But the US needed to send a message, and Iraq was simply the most convenient -- and lucrative -- vehicle. The message is this: Stand in Awe, for Uncle Sam is no Paper Tiger.

Since I'm criticizing McGovern, there's one other myth of the left that I'd like to take one.

Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness.

OK, I agree that the Supreme Court decision was completely partisan and wrong. However, as far as I know, it was also moot. If they had ruled in favor of Gore, he would have lost anyway. That's not to say that the election was just. Only that the Supreme Court is really not to blame for Bush's victory. Blame Al Gore or Katherine Harris or Jeb Bush instead.

Welcome to the latest member of the Mcblogosphere: Karaab.

The War on Terror: Keeping America safe from bad video game jokes.

Sturgis police arrested seven Sturgis men for placing more than 20 threatening letters on various businesses, schools, banks and at the post office. At least 12 signs were posted Monday morning. Another 20 were put up Tuesday evening, according to Sturgis police.

The letters all read "All your base are belong to us and you have no chance to survive, make your time.

...

The "All your base are belong to us" are lines said by Cats, a bad guy in a 1989 Japanese video game. The poor translation to English led to its use by many involved in the video game culture.

I just sent my check in for the October 4 Alcatraz invitational. Now I've got just one question: "Who's coming with me?"

More Dolphin News: Covert Flipper Ops.

Was Tacoma rescued in a daring pre-dawn raid on the Baghdad Zoo? The military ain't saying.


Because of the secrecy surrounding the mission, LaPuzza would not say where Tacoma was found or how many dolphins are involved in the effort.

The Onion: once again a step behind the Seattle Times.

"Sure, they'll tell you about the success of the Navy dolphins, but will they tell you about the 10,000-dolphin protest in Chicago last weekend?"

The 100 best April Fool's Day Hoaxes of all time.

This one is my favorite:

In 2000 a news release was sent to the media stating that the 15th annual New York City April Fool's Day Parade was scheduled to begin at noon on 59th Street and would proceed down to Fifth Avenue. According to the release, floats in the parade would include a "Beat 'em, Bust 'em, Book 'em" float created by the New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle police departments. This float would portray "themes of brutality, corruption and incompetence." A "Where's Mars?" float, reportedly built at a cost of $10 billion, would portray missed Mars missions. Finally, the "Atlanta Braves Baseball Tribute to Racism" float would feature John Rocker who would be "spewing racial epithets at the crowd." CNN and the Fox affiliate WNYW sent television news crews to cover the parade. They arrived at 59th Street at noon only to discover that there was no sign of a parade, at which point the reporters realized they had been hoaxed. The prank was the handiwork of Joey Skaggs, an experienced hoaxer. Skaggs had been issuing press releases advertising the nonexistent parade every April Fool's Day since 1986.

Coalition of the Afraid

And yesterday morning around ten, a dozen ragtag demonstrators marched up Market near Second, evincing support for the U.S.A. The group was mostly school kids, led by a few adults. The grown-up leader carried Old Glory and an impromptu eternal flame, made of aluminum foil and an old Tiki torch. ... As the leader called out chants, the kids responded in kind. So as he said, "Support our troops!" the kids chorused, "We support our troops!" And as he said, "God Bless the U.S. of A," the kids returned with, "We are still blessed!" When the leader yelled out, "We are God-fearing!" the kids were momentarily taken aback. Then one yelled out, "We are still afraid!"