Forgot to mention something I saw a few days ago... a biker getting hit by a car. This was on South Clinton, a couple of blocks before you pass the Topps plaza. To be precise, I didn't see him get hit, as I was in a line of traffic about ten cars back from the intersection where it happened. Once traffic started moving again, I saw the biker on the ground, not moving, and a woman who had gotten out of her small red car that she had hit him with, in hysterics. The ambulance was just arriving.

I love to say "I told you so." On October 13, I was bitching about how bicycles are simply too unsafe for public roads, and should be banned because they're dangerous to bikers and drivers. People who ride their bikes on public roads may need to do so because they don't have a car, and that's society's fault. Those that do so recreationally should be shot. Perhaps this is a signal that some sort of free public transportation needs to be more readily available in Rochester, and probably in a lot of other cities. To further this cause, the next time you see a biker, hit him. Just kidding... unless it looks like he's just out there for fun. Then hit him, and if you have time and don't mind doing it for the public good, back over him again.

Brian Yeager, I can't decide if you suck.

Check this out - The gist of it: Anyone with a GPS device can locate a point where an official longitude line and latitude line cross (no matter where you are, you're within 79 km of one). You track down this point, then take pictures of it. Sounds stupid, but you factor in mountains and rivers and stuff, and it could get pretty nuts. Who wants to go four wheeling?

Got tired of being on blogspot.com and dealing with banner ads, so it's on my server now, and at the ultra-awesome domain name, www.mattdana.com .

CNN.com - Review: 'The Missing' a powerful work - Nov. 25, 2003: "As usual, Blanchett is a marvel to behold. Is there anyone or anything this woman cannot play? Not a conventional beauty, Blanchett radiates personality in every role she plays. You never see her acting -- she just becomes." - I want to see this movie, but I think I hate Cate Blanchett. Why does everyone like her but me? She's so bad as Galadriel in Lord of the Rings (HOW BAD IS SHE?!?!)... I got nothin. She's bad. The Missing sounds good, but I don't know if I can take her seriously.

Kerry goes on attack in Iowa fracas - So I got pretty pumped to watch last night's debate, the first one I've remembered to catch. I was looking forward to an intelligent formal debate. Instead, I saw ten or so human tape recorders up on a stage, with about 30 half-minute speeches memorized each, which they would apply to each question asked by deciding which of their prerecorded speeches best matched the question. It was something you'd have to watch to really get how retarded it was. They were getting asked great questions, and responding with boring "answers" that only vaguely related to the question, and had clearly been written beforehand. They wonder why people don't vote; it's because politics is just a big heap of pandering bullshit -- all of it.

maddox.xmission.net

CNN.com - Gates tries out anti-couch potato game - Nov. 18, 2003 - Awesome. I can't wait until the day where instead of doing boring cardio like running or using an elliptical machine, you can play a video game that keeps it interesting.

MSNBC - This story's all about how fast food restaurants are unclean and you can get sick eating at them. But how fair is it to run a story on fast food and not on regular restaurants? I bet local diners and places like that are even worse... and having worked at a couple restaurants, I'm not even shocked in the slightest by this story -- restaurants are just too busy to be perfect about food safety.

Yahoo! Sports - "A day earlier, Mourning had threatened to go after Martin when some taunting got too personal. Martin and teammate Richard Jefferson had been joking about Mourning's inability to run conditioning drills near the end of practice.

Mourning then apparently said something about Martin's recovery from a sprained ankle. Martin responded with a comment about Mourning's life-threatening kidney disease that forced Mourning to miss most of two of the last three seasons.

Mourning became incensed and went after Martin, shouting, ``You talk about my kidney? I'll put you on your back.''

Teammates Rodney Rogers and Aaron Williams grabbed Mourning and held him back."

Awesome. The NBA should seriously have its own reality show.

MLB making fatal mistake - "Baseball remains in fear of two things as the steroid scandal in sports continues to grow. One is the book by long-time slugger Jose Canseco. The former MVP received an estimated $1 million advance for the tell-all, in which he promises to reveal how steroids are abused in baseball and may even name names of some of the biggest stars (like himself) who used them." Roger Maris's record never should have been broken -- at least not officially. Sosa, McGwire (sp?), and Bonds play in an era where you probably have to use performance enhancers just to stay competitive. Of course they're amazing players, but they're playing a whole different ball game.

CNN.com - Police await Michael Jackson's surrender - Nov. 20, 2003 - My question is, who was actually still letting their kids sleep at Neverland Ranch? One child molestation charge wasn't enough to convince some parents that hey, maybe our kid should do a normal sleepover somewhere that doesn't involve a 45-year-old hermaphrodite?

Scott Peterson to stand trial - "A battle over a 6-inch strand of dark hair dominated the four weeks of testimony, with prosecutors winning the right to introduce DNA testimony linking the hair to Laci Peterson and connecting her to the boat prosecutors believe Scott Peterson used to ferry her to a watery grave." Guilty. Seriously. There's so much evidence on this guy who killed his pregnant wife, I'd lose all faith in the justice system (wait... did I just say I had faith in the justice system?) if he gets anything less than life in prison.

Holy Stinky My new hobby: Thinking of random phrases, typing them into google (in quotes, so it finds the whole phrase intact), and seeing what comes up.

Ala. chief justice ousted over 10 Commandments - "Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, whose refusal to obey a federal order to move a Ten Commandments monument from a state building fueled a national debate over the place of God in public life, was stripped of his office Thursday." -- I'm not big on organized religion, but this guy has balls. You have to respect someone who stands up for what he believes in even after it costs him his job.

Welcome to History 2.0 - "ON THURSDAY, OCT. 23, founder Jeff Bezos told customers that his “search inside the book” service would allow them to type a name or phrase—and be immediately rewarded with a report of instances of those words appearing in the pages of one of 120,000 tomes. Then, with a single click, Amazon would deliver an image of the very page in question." Very, very cool. Why wasn't this available five years ago? It's not like there's any new technology making this happen -- scanners and OCR (scan-to-text) software have been around for twenty years. Maybe it took that long to scan 120,000 books.

Don't read this if you haven't seen the new Matrix yet.

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I liked it for the action, but what disappoints me is that it never delivered on the promise made at the end of the first movie. Neo, talking on a pay phone, presumably to the agents or the computer mainframe, says something along the lines of "I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see." I was hoping Neo would actually do that -- make the Matrix unbelievable enough that people inside would begin to "wake up" and no longer accept the program. Then you'd see the Matrix itself come apart at the seams... that would be cool. But instead, the whole point turns out to be saving Zion... even though the machines are left completely in control of the planet, and the majority of the human race remains enslaved. That's not satisfying, nor is it at all what the first movie promised. And what is keeping the machines from just turning around and blowing the crap out of Zion? A promise they made to Neo? Right. There was a lot of cool stuff in the movie, and it was fun to watch, but I'm left feeling like very little was actually resolved. There could be easily be another movie -- or three.

CNN.com - Report: Mossad probing baby deaths - Nov. 10, 2003 A bunch of babies died because they drank formula with something wrong with it. What went wrong? "Vitamin B1, also known as thiamin, is vital for development of the nervous system in babies. Health Ministry officials say more than 20 infants suffered from a disorder caused by a deficiency in the vitamin after drinking the formula, and three have died." The formula somehow had no vitamin B1, and now the babies who didn't die are likely to have underdeveloped nervous systems, which doesn't sound particularly good to me.

Is something like that ever going to happen with breast milk? No. So much is going on in the first few weeks of life, and so much can go wrong and permanently affect a baby's future -- why would you take a risk on a mass-produced product?

Yeah, you know the blog is cookin' when I start talking about breast feeding.

Update: Caurie and Art's baby Brice is doing great. Very, very cute.

CNN.com - Alaska authorizes aerial wolf shooting - Nov. 5, 2003 - I'm no tree-hugger, but I don't like this. Wolves are highly intelligent, social animals, and they mourn the passing of a family member just like we do. If this is being done just to improve hunting conditions, then maybe the hunters should just take a year off from killing moose and caribou, and give those species a chance to reproduce normally. That certainly makes more sense than trying to dictate the course of nature by shooting animals out of planes!

CNN.com - Girls pummel man who exposed himself - Oct. 31, 2003 Kudos to Sean Dana for pointing this important story out...

Yahoo! News - Fisticuffs Again Bring Venezuela Parliament to Halt - "Millan, of the pro-government Podemos party, accused Heydra of insulting him.

Heydra, dabbing a cut lip, told a different story. 'He came up to me while I was talking and hit me in a cowardly manner,' he told reporters." - This made me laugh.

Bush to sign anti-abortion measure - "The bill forbids a procedure known as intact dilation and extraction, generally performed in the second or third trimester, in which a fetus is partly delivered before being killed, usually by having its skull punctured." Here's why I agree with the Republicans on this one: If you waited until this late in your pregnancy to decide to have an abortion, it's too late. I realize it's a gray area, but when it gets to the point where you need to stab someone in the head and kill them, that's wrong. Abortion shouldn't even be an issue because condoms are free, and many other methods of even more effective birth control are available cheaply and discreetly, but... well, see the quote at the top of this page.

Dean for America: I wish I could vote twice for this guy.

Congratulations to Caurie and Art on the birth of Brice Arthur late last night. 7 lbs, 8 oz I believe, though he looked bigger to me. Definitely a healthy little guy... the way he was violently kicking and punching the air for no apparent reason made me wonder how the hell pregnant women can deal with these little ninjas in their bellies. Yep, it's good to be the guy.

The Knicks had their best defensive effort ever in a 75-68 victory, and the Magic shot a franchise-low 25 percent from the field Monday night. This just makes me sort of wistfully remember the past. The way it used to be, Pat Riley took a team of low-talent guys and taught them to scrap and fight for every possession, and pound the other team with a highly physical D until they were reluctant to go up for a layup for fear they'd get their brains splattered all over the backboard. That was the team I grew up with and loved, before Scott Layden turned the Knicks into the Mets of the NBA. There's no way I expect a Don Chaney-coached team to keep up that kind of Tenacious D.

ESPN.com - Page2 - Analyzing the Leastern Conference: "Scott Layden shouldn't just be fired, he should be facing a civil suit filed against him by Knicks fans. Seriously. Shouldn't you be able to sue someone for doing this to your favorite team? Has that ever happened before? At the very least, he should be forced to live in a reality-TV house with Grady Little, Bob Whitsitt, Jim Haslett and Gregg Williams, where they have no electricity, no bathrooms and no food for six weeks."

Sorry, but fucking amen.

Tuna Meter — gauging Parcells’ mood - Kind of an interesting blog of some sort...

CNN.com - Tenacious D: We'll starve for rock - Nov. 4, 2003 I've never seen a group get so much out of one record, but on the other hand I don't think there's ever been a "band" like Tenacious D before.

I can judge my cube-mate's intelligence just by the fact that he's not smart enough to not shout at people when he has headphones on.