Monthly Archives: February 2005

Poetry day at the pit

The muse hasn’t abandoned me entirely. __________________________ Certainty 1. Breach – tree-spined, arcing down the Four Mile, north, toward the river. dis / connect snowfall from swerving ridgeline hill from hollow moon from fractured day limping home on splints of headlight 2. Kitchen light imp of wick and tallow warms the plane and groove of hand-tooled oak. Our grandfathers are

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False positives are failures, too

bruce_schneier is dead on today: The TSA likes to measure its success by looking at the forbidden items they have prevented from being carried onto aircraft, but that’s wrong. Every time the TSA takes a pocketknife from an innocent person, that’s a security failure. It’s a false alarm. The system has prevented access where no prevention was required. Right. And

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For a good time, call Vivienne*

[Thx to ultimate_seeker for passing this item on.] Cell companies ready to roll out new virtual girlfriend on 3G networks Men, are you tired of the time, trouble and expense of having a girlfriend? Irritated by the difficulty of finding a new one? Eberhard Schöneburg, the chief executive of the software maker Artificial Life Inc. of Hong Kong, may have

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Not Machiavelli, but Robespierre?

Dr. Jim Booth – aka sirpaulsbuddy – thinks I may be off in my earlier suggestion that the Dems need to get themselves a Machiavelli. In his view, what is called for is instead a Robespierre, an uncompromising flamethrower of civic virtue. Maybe. Perhaps it depends on how much credit you give the public. I’ve been cynical of late (and

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Breaking Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx scandal – if you die, these are the people to sue

[Thx to Cody Barstow of Mojo City News for pointing this out.] NY Times: 10 Voters on Panel Backing Pain Pills Had Industry Ties Ten of the 32 government drug advisers who last week endorsed continued marketing of the huge-selling pain pills Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx have consulted in recent years for the drugs’ makers, according to disclosures in medical

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Some advice for the DNC

Nicked from the letters section at Romenesko: From JEROME WEEKS, Dallas Morning News: Given the recent back-and-forth in these letters about insider access and political manipulation — including William E. Jackson, Jr’s posting about the Judith Miller/Ahmad Chalabi resurrection — interested reporters should pick up the March 10 issue of The New York Review of Books — for the letters

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Interview with HST’s son

Son says Hunter Thompson may have just decided it was time He considers his father “a patriot in the truest sense of the word,” someone who believed deeply in civil rights and democracy but was appalled by the nation’s failure to live up to its ideals. “Part of the power of his writing is his disgust with the gap between

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Stupid Bugs

Disclaimer: I was a huge Charlotte Hornets fan and Shinn & Woolridge can go directly to hell. That said, I’m having a hell of a time trying to figure out what these morons are trying to accomplish here at the trade deadline. Baron Davis for Dale Davis and Speedy Claxton? Ummm, okay. Glenn Robinson? I guess that’s a money move,

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Final hockey thoughts

I’ve held my tongue on this NHL debacle, but now that the corpse of the 2004-2005 season has finally stopped sitting up in the coffin to insist that it’s still alive, I wanted to offer a couple comments. First, I’m not sure I’ll lose any sleep over the players and owners and all the money they’re flushing. There’s plenty of

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Sam Smith

samuel is the #60 most common male name. 0.306% of men in the US are named samuel. Around 374,850 US men are named samuel! source namestatistics.com smith is the #1 most common last name. 1.006% of last names in the US are smith. Around 2,515,000 US last names are smith! source namestatistics.com

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Interesting interview with a progressive evangelical

Interesting SF Gate interview today with Jim Wallis on “Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” Jim Wallis, a left-wing evangelical Christian who believes Democrats need to affirm the role of faith in shaping public policy…argues that conservative Republicans have taken control of the discussion about religion and morality in this country and have used

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