Principal shot in Wis. school - Crime & Punishment - MSNBC.com:

A 15-year-old student armed with two guns shot and wounded the principal of his school in western Wisconsin on Friday, authorities said.

We should probably just start locking down kids with fewer than three friends. Or anyone who ever wore a black trenchcoat. Or any trenchcoat, really.

MySpace could be worth around $15 billion - U.S. Business - MSNBC.com:

MySpace, the social networking Web site, could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp., a Wall Street media analyst forecast on Wednesday.

MySpace is one of the most poorly-constructed web sites I've ever used. The entire thing needs to be pulled apart and rebuilt. It's slow, cumbersome, and absolutely infuriating sometimes (example: someone sends you a message. You get an e-mail with a link to go see the message. You click it, and get a login screen. You log in, and instead of taking you to the message, it brings you to your home screen. Then you have to find the message, which is made the all more irritating by how slow and clunky the interface is). I can't understand how a web site that's worth so much money hasn't been re-constructed by someone who knows what they're doing.

God, we suck.

WP: Iraq police academy a 'disaster' - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com:

A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed 'the rain forest.'

Iowan finds drowned bat in tea mug - Animal Peculiarity - MSNBC.com:

A western Iowa woman is recovering from the shock of finding a drowned bat in her tea mug — after she sipped from the cup all day.

You know that bat did it out of spite.

Falwell calls comment ‘tongue-in-cheek’ - Politics - MSNBC.com:

Falwell said religious conservatives do not favor Clinton for several reasons, but mostly because she is pro-choice on abortion, “the cutting-edge issue for social conservatives.”

Hasn't the debate over abortion been around for several decades at this point? How is this a cutting-edge issue?

If you own one of these mouse pads, that is. Though I will admit Alyssa Milano is teh hawt. Yes, the boobs are made of the same gellin'-like-a-felon stuff Dr. Scholls uses... it's a nice soft wrist-rest! They should come out with one for Mary-Kate Olsen, since they'd save on production costs; they wouldn't need to use any of the gel on hers.

A bar in the student union at a college in London is awesome for more than just being a bar on a college campus. That computer screen on the table at right is used for ordering drinks, so you don't even have to go up to the bar and wait to order. Cool for so many reasons:

1. No more mass of people fighting for position at the bar. First drink order in is the first one served, simple as that.
   
2. You get the time to think about what you're ordering, rather than just getting the same old thing because the bartender's rushing you to make up your mind.
   
3. No more awkwardness about buying rounds. Everyone orders their own drinks, and gets a bill when they're done.
   
4. It also can be used to call a cab, and IM people at other tables (obviously going to be abused for humor's sake but I think that's the whole point).
   

So I take these fish oil pills because they're supposed to be good for you, somehow. And by "take" I don't mean "regularly," I mean "whenever I notice them in my mini-fridge at work and remember I'm supposed to take them, which is about once a week."

Anydangway, I just burped and got an extremely strong taste of fish going on, like I had just freebased some salmon. Couldn't figure it out until I remembered the pills. Now I'm a little grossed out by them.

Glad I took the time to share this.

WP: Canadian was falsely accused - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com:

Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.

The report, released in Ottawa, was the result of a 2 1/2-year inquiry that represented one of the first public investigations into mistakes made as part of the United States' 'extraordinary rendition' program, which has secretly spirited suspects to foreign countries for interrogation by often brutal methods.

What does it say about us that we can't even do a little research before we send someone off to be tortured? This guy didn't do anything wrong other than having an Arab name, and he wound up being listed as "an Islamic extremist individual" and then:

Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found.

Makes me feel literally sick to my stomach.

Poland to send 1,000 troops to Afghanistan - South and Central Asia - MSNBC.com:

Poland said Thursday it would send 1,000 new troops to join its existing 100-strong contingent in Afghanistan in response to NATO calls for reinforcements to step up the fight against Taliban insurgents.

Let's just hope they're not sending any of their submarines (with screen doors) or helicopters (with ejection seats).

Wait, wait, I've got a better one: Is this the crack light-bulb-screwing-in squad?

I kill me!

How quickly we forget - I woke up this morning almost completely oblivious to the fact that today was 9/11. I didn't know anyone who died or was hurt that day, so I'll keep this brief because you'd be better off spending your time reading something written by someone who did.

For me, one of the most moving experiences post-9/11 was watching comedians try to make sense of their jobs afterwards. The first Letterman and Stewart shows filmed after 9/11 are available on YouTube and you should really check them out when you get a chance. They both did the brave thing and made it clear that they wouldn't stop doing their jobs, even though nobody really felt like laughing at the time.

At the time, Dave Barry still had his weekly syndicated humor column going. Here's his column from 9/13/01. I've been his biggest fan since I was ten years old, so it meant a lot to me to read this five years ago, and it was quite an experience to read it again today (he re-posted it on his blog).

---

JUST FOR BEING AMERICANS . . .

By DAVE BARRY, Herald Columnist

No humor column today. I don't want to write it, and you don't want to read it.

No words of wisdom, either. I wish I were wise enough to say something that would help make sense of this horror, something that would help ease the unimaginable pain of the victims' loved ones, but I'm not that wise. I'm barely capable of thinking. Like many others, I've spent the hours since Tuesday morning staring at the television screen, sometimes crying, sometimes furious, but mostly just stunned.

What I can't get out of my mind is the fact that they used our own planes. I grew up in the Cold War, when we always pictured the threat as coming in the form of missiles - sleek, efficient death machines, unmanned, hurtling over the North Pole from far away. But what came, instead, were our own commercial airliners, big friendly flying buses coming from Newark and Boston with innocent people on board. Red, white and blue planes, with "United" and "American" written on the side. The planes you've flown in and I've flown in. That's what they used to attack us. They were able to do it in part because our airport security is pathetic. But mainly they were able to do it because we are an open and trusting society that simply is not set up to cope with evil men, right here among us, who want to kill as many Americans as they can.

That's what's so hard to comprehend: They want us to die just for being Americans. They don't care which Americans die: military Americans, civilian Americans, young Americans, old Americans. Baby Americans. They don't care. To them, we're all mortal enemies. The truth is that most Americans, until Tuesday, were only dimly aware of their existence, and posed no threat to them. But that doesn't matter to them; all that matters is that we're Americans. And so they used our own planes to kill us.

And then their supporters celebrated in the streets.

I'm not naive about my country. My country is definitely not always right; my country has at times been terribly wrong. But I know this about Americans: We don't set out to kill innocent people. We don't cheer when innocent people die.

A DECENT PEOPLE

The people who did this to us are monsters; the people who cheered them have hate-sickened minds. One reason they can cheer is that they know we would never do to them what their heroes did to us, even though we could, a thousand times worse. They know that when we hunt down the monsters, we will try hard not to harm the innocent. Those are the handcuffs we willingly wear, because for all our flaws, we are a decent people.

And now we are a traumatized people. The TV commentators keep saying that the attacks have awakened a "sleeping giant." And I guess we do look like a giant, to the rest of the world. But when I look around, I don't see a giant: I see millions of individuals - the resilient and caring citizens of New York and Washington; the incredibly brave firefighters, police officers and rescue workers risking their lives in the dust and flames; the politicians standing on the steps of the Capitol and singing an off-key rendition of God Bless America that, corny as it was, had me weeping; the reporters and photographers who have not slept, and will not sleep, as long as there is news to report; the people in my community, and communities across America, lining up to give blood, wishing they could do more.

A GOOD COUNTRY

No, I don't see a giant. What I see is Americans. We may have the power of a giant, but we also have the heart of a good and generous people, and we will get through this. We will grieve for our dead, and tend to our wounded, and repair the damage, and tighten our security, and put our planes back in the air. Eventually most of us, the ones lucky enough not to have lost somebody, will resume our lives. Some day, our country will track down the rest of the monsters behind this, and make them pay, and I suppose that will make most of us feel a little better. But revenge and hatred won't be why we'll go on. We'll go on because we know this is a good country, a country worth keeping.

Those who would destroy it only make us see more clearly how precious it is.

© 2001

A for effort, but any robot that took this long to pour me a damn beer would be a dead robot very quickly.

I rule at this game.

I hate this stupid country sometimes. Well, the South anyway.

Crooks and Liars » New Poll: 43% Still Believe Saddam Had Something To Do With 9/11:

Even after Bush says that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and that his administration never tried to make that connection (yeah right), the damage is done and many Americans still believe otherwise. The poll also shows that the lower education someone has, the higher the chances they believe in the Saddam/9-11 connection.

The other interesting part, is also bad news for Bush, which is 53% don’t see Iraq as part of the War on Terror. The White House constantly says they don’t look at the polls, yet the numbers on Iraq keep getting worse for Bush and as they do, then the number of speeches he makes increases. Yeah - I guess that is just some sort of freakish timing.

Or you would be, if this laptop (one of the Dells that have been exploding lately) was sitting on top of your old set.

Of nuts.

Not sure if that was clear.

As much as I hate to criticize a free service, I have to admit: Blogger really sucks. Haven't been able to post for the past week. I'll be doing something more home-brewed soon enough... not that I have any time to put it together.