Good Grief!

Edward Felton has written some thoughtful commentary on recent criticism of Howard Dean’s March 2002 keynote address at a state security workshop.
Felton summarizes the situation better than I can, but in a nutshell…Declan McCullagn used Dean’s speech to portray him as an anti-privacy candidate. Felton and others (Larry Lessig and Andrew Orlowski) point out […]

Some common Superbowl legends that are false, according to snopes.com:

sewage systems of major cities have broken due to the tremendous amount of toilets being flushed simultaneously at halftime
Superbowl Sunday is a good time to visit Disneyland
two-thirds of all avocados sold in the USA are bought within three weeks of Superbowl Sunday (or stolen)
[via GeekPress]

No Tags

An Arkansas lawyer and his son are going to jail for mailing a poisonous snake:
Bob Sam Castleman, an attorney and former city judge in Pocahontas, Arkansas, and his son, Jerrod, were charged with mailing a cardboard box containing a venomous copperhead snake to a neighbor with whom they had feuded. The two pleaded guilty in […]

Inspired by a reader’s e-mail…top 5 dolls:

biblical action figures
Boohbahs*
talking Ann Coulter action figure (thanks, Steve!)
Phillie Phanatic
Timmy the ThinkGeek kung-foo monkey coder
*Boohbahs are very hypnotic creatures. Go here to play with Boohbahs.

No Tags

The New York Times is reporting that President Bush will be seeking more money for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA):
Administration officials, including White House budget experts, said that Mr. Bush would propose an increase of $15 million to $20 million for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. That would be the […]

So, if you Google your date and find out that he or she is wanted by the FBI, you can always turn to booble.com–the adult search engine. This site was launched on Jan. 20th, and it didn’t take long for Google’s lawyers to insist that the domain be turned over to Google:
We have recently […]

A woman in New York City Googled her date and found out that he was wanted for stealing $184,000 from the city of Cincinnati:
Pettus-Brown’s prospective date, whose name has not been released, ran his name through the Google Internet search engine and found an FBI warrant for his arrest.
Admit it–you’ve done this! You can […]

I thought it would be a good idea to have some ongoing commentary about the importance of expressing ideas clearly. Not to keep picking on the radio folks (see my Conjunction Function post), but I heard another strange thing on NPR this morning:
David Kay, former Iraq weapons inspector, is going to Capitol Hill today […]

Across the Atlantic, the Hutton Report has been released, so it seems like a good time to follow-up on my post about the BBC’s purchase of Google keywords such as “hutton inquiry” and “hutton report.” When I first blogged, I tried Google.com and Google.co.uk and didn’t see any BBC sponsored links. Just now, […]

A while back, I blogged about a new Chinese search engine and mentioned some of the odd websites that are blocked in that country. On a more serious note, the BBC online is reporting the latest stats from Amnesty International:
there are now at least 54 people who have been imprisoned for emailing, setting up […]