Non-Dailies:
Red Meat
Platinum Grit

It's not just a slack thing, come to think of it. I'm tired, run off my feet. I'm becoming a grumpy bastard. Hmmm.

Deploying yourself as a human shield for lame wannabe anarchists who like to pick fights with police and kill their horses might be all very well and good, but in my opinion doesn't hold a candle to media hackery like this:

Leaked Memo Reveals WTO Plan to "Sell" Itself to American Youth

When did your favourite TV show jump the shark?

I'm flabbergasted. Someone out there is so determined to "win" the distributed.net contest that they wrote a worm which scans for Windows 98 systems on the Internet, hacks into them, and installs both a copy of the worm -- power corrupts, and exponentially increasing power over time is kinda nifty -- and the distributed.net client. As the Honeynet paper Know Your Enemy says:

People are awarded prizes if the crack the challenge. The more computers and CPU cycles you have under your control, the better of your chances of winning. In our case, someone "volunteered" us for the project by installing the worm on our system.

That's got to be one of the most elegantly nutso black-hat ideas I've ever heard.

Better yet, multiple people have duplicated the effort, and their worms are competitive, each trying to uninstall other worms that got there first. Classic!

You've got to be kidding me: Nasubi.

Nippon Television's (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn't have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn't have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn't have kept him there for over a year until he had won $10 000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn't have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

Plastic | The Reality TV Show You Don't Want to Star In lets us know bits of the inside story:

My Japanese friends and I in college used to watch tapes of this show. It was hilarious. It was also common knowledge among them that Nasubi was a professional actor/comedian who's career in the past few years had gone downhill. [...] His career is back on track in Japan, just as he had expected by agreeing to this gig.

Oh, am I glad I don't have this much money:Sound Crazy? (at washingtonpost.com).

[T]he process is never-ending. Once you have the equipment, you need air bladders to eliminate vibrations. Once you've eliminated vibrations, you need better equipment. Then you need better air bladders, and so on until you've spent an ungodly amount.

Until you've spent $140,000. For that money, a local company called the Gene Donati Orchestras will send a string quartet to your home and play on your patio once a week for more than a year. Which is why audiophiles spend a lot of time defending their sanity.

NerdSigns - the Y2K Compliant Horoscope

EDO, the RAM (March 21st ~ April 19th)

Quick to learn new things and energetic in taking on new tasks, people born under the sign of the RAM tend to lose interest in old or boring tasks if their excitement level is not frequently refreshed.

Possessed of a deep committment to fairness in their dealings with others, they strive to maintain parity in all their interactions and will immediately detect imbalance or error.

The Radioactive Boy Scout

The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project.

You have got to be kidding me. US boy caged for drawing gun in class.

The school has stated that the boy will not be charged, even though he apparently just went straight ahead, pulled out a pencil and sketched a gun in full view of his terrified peers.

You have got to be kidding me. US boy caged for drawing gun in class.

The school has stated that the boy will not be charged, even though he apparently just went straight ahead, pulled out a pencil and sketched a gun in full view of his terrified peers.

Principal Schmitt concluded: "We just need to get it through kids' heads that there are certain things you don't say and there are certain things you don't draw."

Seeing a link to the Narcolepsy Network reminds me of the one about the narcoleptic girl whose friends competed to tell jokes funny enough that she'd laugh so much her nervous system shut down.

The Idler: Off Peak Living

Beware, the Chaps Man.

Jet lag can affect the brain. That explains it, I guess.

"... the right temporal lobe, a part of the brain involved in memory, is smaller in airline crew members who cross multiple time zones and have only five days of rest before crossing time zones again, compared with workers who crossed multiple time zones but had 14 days of recovery before taking another flight around the world."

"For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it."

-- George W. Bush

The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated

Following up my rant on deaf whales: Whales are all ears for Navy.

The Last LTUAE message.

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