A grand jury today indicted a man called Zacarias Moussaoui for conspiring
in the 11 September attacks.  The six charges are as follows: Conspiracy to
Commit Acts of Terrorism Transcending National Boundaries, Conspiracy to
Commit Aircraft Piracy, Conspiracy to Destroy Aircraft, Conspiracy to Use
Weapons of Mass Destruction, Conspiracy to Murder United States Employees,
and Conspiracy to Destroy Property.  The indictment
makes for interesting reading, as do the statutes under which he is
charged.  I present below, for those who are interested, the text of the
sections.  I have emphasized in bold italic type specific
sections that may be noteworthy.

Count One, Conspiracy to Commit Acts of Terrorism Transcending National
Boundaries (18 U.S.C. §§ 2332b(a)(2) & (c))

(Text

of Statute)

Section 2332b. Acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries

      (a) Prohibited Acts. -

        (1) Offenses. – Whoever, involving conduct transcending

      national boundaries and in a circumstance described in

subsection

      (b) -

          (A) kills, kidnaps, maims, commits an assault resulting in

        serious bodily injury, or assaults with a dangerous weapon any

        person within the United States; or

          (B) creates a substantial risk of serious bodily injury to

        any other person by destroying or damaging any structure,

        conveyance, or other real or personal property within the

        United States or by attempting or conspiring to destroy or

        damage any structure, conveyance, or other real or personal

        property within the United States;

      in violation of the laws of any State, or the United States,

      shall be punished as prescribed in subsection (c).

        (2) Treatment of threats, attempts and conspiracies. – Whoever

      threatens to commit an offense under paragraph (1), or attempts

      or conspires to do so, shall be punished under subsection

(c).

      [...]

      (c) Penalties. -

        (1) Penalties. – Whoever violates this section shall be

      punished -

          (A) for a killing, or if death results to any person from

any

        other conduct prohibited by this section, by death, or by

        imprisonment for any term of years or for life;

          (B) for kidnapping, by imprisonment for any term of years or

        for life;

          (C) for maiming, by imprisonment for not more than 35 years;

          (D) for assault with a dangerous weapon or assault resulting

        in serious bodily injury, by imprisonment for not more than 30

        years;

          (E) for destroying or damaging any structure, conveyance, or

        other real or personal property, by imprisonment for not more

        than 25 years;

          (F) for attempting or conspiring to commit an offense, for

        any term of years up to the maximum punishment that would have

        applied had the offense been completed; and

          (G) for threatening to commit an offense under this section,

        by imprisonment for not more than 10 years.

        (2) Consecutive sentence. – Notwithstanding any other provision

      of law, the court shall not place on probation any person

      convicted of a violation of this section; nor shall the term of

      imprisonment imposed under this section run concurrently with any

      other term of imprisonment.

      

Count Two, Conspiracy to Commit Aircraft Piracy (49 U.S.C. §§
46502(a)(1)(A) and (a)(2)(B))

(Text

of Statute)

Section 46502. Aircraft piracy

      (a) In Special Aircraft Jurisdiction. – (1) In this subsection -

        (A) ”aircraft piracy” means seizing or exercising control of

      an aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United

      States by force, violence, threat of force or violence, or any

      form of intimidation, and with wrongful intent.

      [...]

      (2) An individual committing or attempting or conspiring to

    commit aircraft piracy -

      [...]

        (B) notwithstanding section 3559(b) of title 18, if the death

      of another individual results from the commission or attempt,

      shall be put to death or imprisoned for life.

      [...]

Count Three, Conspiracy to Destroy Aircraft (18 U.S.C. §§
32(a)(7) and (34))

(Text

of Statute), (Text

of Statute)

Section 32. Destruction of aircraft or aircraft facilities

      (a) Whoever willfully -

        (1) sets fire to, damages, destroys, disables, or

wrecks any

      aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United

      States or any civil aircraft used, operated, or employed in

      interstate, overseas, or foreign air commerce;

      [...]

        (7) attempts or conspires to do anything prohibited under

      paragraphs (1) through (6) of this subsection;

    shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty

    years or both.

      

      Whoever is convicted of any crime prohibited by this chapter,

    which has resulted in the death of any person, shall be subject

    also to the death penalty or to imprisonment for life.

Count Four, Conspiracy to Use Weapons of Mass Destruction (18 U.S.C.
§§ 2332a(a))

(Text

of Statute)

Section 2332a. Use of certain weapons of mass destruction

      (a) Offense Against a National of the United States or

    Within the United States. – A person who, without lawful

    authority, uses, threatens, or attempts or conspires to use, a weapon of mass

    destruction [From the indictment: "namely, airplanes intended for use

    as missiles, bombs, and similar devices". -JHM] (other than a

    chemical weapon as that term is defined

    in section 229F), including any biological agent, toxin, or vector

    (as those terms are defined in section 178) -

        (1) against a national of the United States while such national

      is outside of the United States;

        (2) against any person within the United States, and the

      results of such use affect interstate or foreign commerce or,

in

      the case of a threat, attempt, or conspiracy, would have

affected

      interstate or foreign commerce; or

        (3) against any property that is owned, leased or used by the

      United States or by any department or agency of the United

      States, whether the property is within or outside of the United

      States,

    shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life, and if

death

    results, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of

    years or for life.

Count Five, Conspiracy to Murder United States Employees (18 U.S.C.
§§ 1114 & 1117)

(Text

of Statute), (Text

of Statute), (Text

of Statute)

Section 1114. Protection of officers and employees of the United
States

      Whoever kills or attempts to kill any officer or employee of

the

    United States or of any agency in any branch of the United

States

    Government (including any member of the uniformed services) while

    such officer or employee is engaged in or on account of the

    performance of official duties, or any person assisting such an

    officer or employee in the performance of such duties or on account

    of that assistance, shall be punished -

        (1) in the case of murder, as provided under section

1111;

        (2) in the case of manslaughter, as provided under section

      1112; or

        (3) in the case of attempted murder or manslaughter, as

      provided in section 1113.

Section 1117. Conspiracy to murder

      If two or more persons conspire to violate section

1111, 1114,

    1116, or 1119 of this title, and one or more of such persons do

any

    overt act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be

    punished by imprisonment for any term of years or for

life.

Referenced:

Section 1111. Murder

      (a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice

    aforethought.  Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in

wait,

    or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and

    premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or

    attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder,

kidnapping,

    treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated

sexual abuse or sexual

    abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated from a premeditated

    design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human

    being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree.

      Any other murder is murder in the second degree.

      (b) Within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of

    the United States,

      Whoever is guilty of murder in the first degree shall be

punished

    by death or by imprisonment for life;

      Whoever is guilty of murder in the second degree, shall be

    imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

Count Six, Conspiracy to Destroy Property (18 U.S.C. §§
844(f),(i),(n))

(Text

of Statute)

Section 844. Penalties

      (f)(1) Whoever maliciously damages or destroys, or

attempts to

    damage or destroy, by means of fire or an explosive, any

building,

    vehicle, or other personal or real property in whole or in part

    owned or possessed by, or leased to, the United States,

or any

    department or agency thereof, shall be imprisoned for not less

than

    5 years and not more than 20 years, fined under this title, or

    both.

      (2) Whoever engages in conduct prohibited by this subsection, and

    as a result of such conduct, directly or proximately causes

    personal injury or creates a substantial risk of injury to any

    person, including any public safety officer performing duties,

    shall be imprisoned for not less than 7 years and not more than 40

    years, fined under this title, or both.

      (3) Whoever engages in conduct prohibited by this subsection, and

    as a result of such conduct directly or proximately causes the

    death of any person, including any public safety officer performing

    duties, shall be subject to the death penalty, or

imprisoned for

    not less than 20 years or for life, fined under this title, or

    both.

      [...]

      (i) Whoever maliciously damages or destroys, or

attempts to

    damage or destroy, by means of fire or an explosive, any

building,

    vehicle, or other real or personal property used in interstate or

    foreign commerce or in any activity affecting interstate or foreign

    commerce shall be imprisoned for not less than 5 years and not

more

    than 20 years, fined under this title, or both; and if personal

    injury results to any person, including any public safety officer

    performing duties as a direct or proximate result of conduct

    prohibited by this subsection, shall be imprisoned for not less

    than 7 years and not more than 40 years, fined under this title, or

    both; and if death results to any person, including any public

    safety officer performing duties as a direct or proximate

result of

    conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall also be subject to

    imprisonment for any term of years, or to the death

penalty or to

    life imprisonment.

      [...]

      (n) Except as otherwise provided in this section, a person who

    conspires to commit any offense defined in this chapter

shall be

    subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death)

as

    the penalties prescribed for the offense the commission of which

    was the object of the conspiracy.

I present a couple of cheesy mnemonics that for some reason jumped into my head from years ago.  Sailing vessels have two sets of running lights, colored differently on each side so that one can tell in which direction the vessel is sailing.  Many people have trouble remembering which side (port or starboard) matches with which color light (red or green.)  So: “Port wine is red.”  For some people this is not much assistance as they cannot remember which side is port and which is starboard.  So: “Port and Left each consist of four letters.”

You are now all set if you want to head off to sea.  But if you want to pack persimmons to take with you, you face another challenge.  In the stores one regularly finds two kinds of persimmons, Fuyu and Hachiya.  One is sweet and can be eaten out-of-hand, the other is highly astringent and is good for cooking.  So remember: Fuyu persimmons are shaped like tomatoes and are sweet like tomatoes, while Hachiya persimmons are shaped like acorns and are astringent like acorns.

If the reader knows all of this already, this probably counts as the most useless post ever to appear on mcgees.org.

When I first started watching BattleBots my mind jumped to three weapons strategies that no one seemed to be employing.  They seemed so effective that I suspected the strategies were explicitly disallowed in the rules.  I downloaded the Technical Regulations [pdf].

Not only are all three strategies disallowed, they are disallowed in the same sub-subsection:

11.4.1 Electricity

Electricity or electric fields may not be used directly as a weapon.  This includes, but is not limited to:

   a. Stun guns and cattle prods.

   b. Radio jamming equipment.

   c. Electro-Magnetic Pulse output.

If it were not for memepool I would never have posts on this site.  This time they linked to a story on Lara St. John’s website.  Lara St. John is a fantastically talented classical violinist whom I have adored since I first saw her, performing live at the Borders Books & Music in Santa Monica, California.  The Carmen Fantasy that appears on her Gypsy album sounds impossible to play (this is not hyperbole) but she makes it come to vibrant life.

The story on her site is entitled Lara’s near-death experience and details her accidental poisoning with hydrogen peroxide during a photo shoot (she was accidentally handed a glass of it when she asked for water.)  Before she had time to stop she had swallowed a tablespoon of an aqueous solution of hydrogen peroxide at 35% (yes, this thoroughly trumps my Gatorade story.)  I’ll spoil the ending: she recovered without needing surgery (this apparently disappointed the surgeons.)  “So life goes back to normal,” she says, “but without spices in food, any alcohol, or anything crunchy, for a while. And apparently things like a Vindaloo curry are out for the rest of my life, or at least a long time.”  She counts this experience among the “random and ridiculous” accidents she has survived throughout her life.  “Apparently someone somewhere is looking out for me,” says Lara, “but I sort of wish they could do so a few split seconds earlier.”

memepool pointed me toward a quiz entitled “The Falwell/Robertson/Bin Laden Quiz”.  The goal is for the viewer to match statements to one of these three men.  The author changes Christian- or Islamic-specific words to general term, and the quotes are slightly modified in the quiz portion to avoid giving extra clues, but the complete quotations are shown on the answers page; in my opinion the rephrasing has not made material changes to the statement.

The next paragraph contains some spoilers, so if you are interested I highly suggest taking the quiz before you proceed.

There are 20 questions in the quiz.  I answered 9 out of 20 correctly, leaving 11 errors.  Four times I answered ‘Pat’ when ‘Jerry’ was correct, or vice versa.  Twice I answered ‘Usama’ when the ‘Pat’ was correct.  And five times I answered ‘Pat’ or ‘Jerry’ when the answer was Usama (four times for the former, once for the latter.)  I was probably biased in that direction because I assumed the quiz was to show that things we thought were Usama-esque statements actually belonged to the two Americans.  But it also suggests that I am used to Pat and Jerry making statements that are hate-filled and incorrect.  Let me cite one of Pat’s extended quotations:

There will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.  How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?

Enough on Usama for a moment.  Let’s think about the Taliban versus Pat and Jerry.  The season pre-premier of The West Wing this season was a hastily-constructed high school lecture.  Literally, actually, as a group of high schoolers served as the foil for the viewers who knew little about the Taliban.  The character of Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) maps the Taliban to Nazis.  I contend that, for a U.S. reader, mapping the Taliban to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and their ilk would be clearer and more accurate.

Some may argue that the Robertson/Falwell vs. Nazi distinction is academic, but I think there is an important point.  The Nazis, for the most part, are a group of a prior era.  They live on in our memories and histories, but Hitler and his contemporaries in the Nazi party are unlikely to directly cause horrors and atrocities today.  Pat and Jerry are alive and kicking.  NBC would never have the courage to map the Taliban to them on air, but I would bet that Sorkin (judging from his politics) wishes he could have done so.

This is a very easy topic to beat into the ground.  I could write for much longer (I have not even gotten to the breakfast I attended at which Falwell, Robertson, Steve Forbes and the mayor of Jerusalem spoke, for instance) but I will conclude this post quickly.  If you (the reader) happen to be a theistically inclined person, fine; have you ever thought that Robertson must be praying to a different deity than you are?  Consider Robertson on the murders of abortion providers: “If the judges appointed by man will not deal with [them] the Lord is going to enter in and bring justice.  And when that happens many of the innocent will suffer along with the guilty.”  His understanding of Yahweh seems not to progress beyond Genesis 7 and Genesis 19.  Even in those two stories the Bible authors had the sense of mind to allege that everyone killed was guilty; the remaining options are that Yahweh has limited power or that Yahweh does not mind killing innocent people just for the hell of it (by the way, the book of Job explores the latter option, where Yahweh does allow the killing of innocents; amusingly it is literally “for the hell of it.”)

It seems that the only reason Robertson believes in Jesus is to give himself more reason to hate those who do not.  Robertson entertains a naïve theology, a sociopathic theology.  It is not that Pat and Jerry have a few things in common with Usama.  Usama is Pat and Jerry.

Retraction:  I likely made an error in my September Satan’s Face post.  Details are available at that link.

Until this year I have identified my political affiliation with the Greens as being a “California Green”; that is, registered with the Green Party of California.  The national coordinating body was previously called the Association of State Green Parties, and in 2001 it voted to become a formal and unified national party organization, maintaining the structure of the established state Green parties.  This is the party that ran the 2000 Nader/LaDuke ticket.  On 8 November (less than one month ago, as of this writing), the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) issued a unanimous opinion recognizing this group as the National Committee of the Green Party.

Phew!

You see, there are actually two parties claiming the title of “The Green Party” in the United States.  The oldest, far more radical, and (in my opinion) far less judicious group is called “Greens / Green Party USA”.  Yes, that is their official title, but they frequently refer to themselves with the almost-as-unwieldy abbreviation “G/GPUSA”.  G/GPUSA calls GPUS “right wing”; a GPUS strategist has described G/GPUSA as being “on the fringes” and having “all sorts of damned-near-communistic ideas.”  Some in G/GPUSA protest that accusation, but a look at their 2000 Platform might suggest otherwise.  This platform promotes, among other things, a 30-hour workweek and the elimination of the U.S. Senate.

Confused yet?  Here is a summary.  The Green Party of the United States has federal recognition, ran Ralph Nader in the campaign, believes that electoral politics is the best route for political change, and is allied with every state Green Party.  The Greens / Green Party USA are self-described radicals, are much smaller, and generate impossible political platforms.  That of course is just my description; a member of the latter party might disagree with me, but would almost certainly call him/herself a radical.

This separation is frustrating.  Greens have enough of a difficult time getting people to take us seriously that we cannot afford to present a fractured front, and the radicals of G/GPUSA just serve to make Greens seem crazy in the popular mindset.  Fortunately most people do not realize this split due to the fringe-ness of G/GPUSA, and I believe (and hope) that the group will fade to effective silence and invisibility in the following years.  (Note: If you are an annoyed G/GPUSA member and decide to email me, that’s fine.  However, in contrast to my normal privacy policies, I explicitly reserve the right to publish any portion of your message on this site.)

The political issue is not the entirety, though.  As an intellectual person I am bothered by people who do not have a grasp of basic logic or composition, and G/GPUSA missives seem naïve, poorly written, insufficiently considered, and factually erroneous.  I will end this post with a passage comparison, juxtaposing excerpts of the two groups’ responses to the 11 September attacks.

From the press release of the Greens / Green Party USA (the group with whom I am not affiliated):

All good people abhor the death and destruction of this past week. People of the world want peace. But they also want justice  …  Clearly, the way countries now deal with one another isn’t working.  The world needs leaders who will set good examples for Earth’s peoples.  Can we not be grown-ups and use this latest Disaster as a starting point for working together towards peace?  …  Bring all American troops home from all over the world [presumably this means a cessation of cooperation with NATO peacekeeping campaigns] …

[T]he Green Party has been active in helping to counter the racist anti-Moslem and anti-Arab hysteria that has led to mindless attacks against Arab and dark-skinned Asian people in New York City and across the country.  We are asking our members to be vigilant, to protect our brothers and sisters from other countries and to speak out against racism and anti-Semitism [sic] wherever it stirs.

Compare this to the Green Party of the United States’ release:

Greens fully support the right and obligation of the U.S. to seek justice.  The complete disregard for the sanctity of human life displayed by the perpetrators of these atrocities must be countered by a just and lawful response  …  While there is never any justification for acts of terror against innocent civilians — indeed it is the quintessential act of dehumanization — the events of September 11th bring Americans the unique occasion to reconsider our government’s role on the world stage  …  The Green Party asserts that a significant aspect of preventing future terrorist attacks on the United States is to insure that our foreign policy is firmly based on economic and social justice  …  [T]he Green Party of the United States urges our fellow citizens and people everywhere to view September 11th as an opportunity to call for an end to all violence towards civilians.  As our platform states, the Green Party seeks strength through peace and asserts that security and liberty prosper together.  While we recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations, we trust that non-violence provides the surest road to peace.

Exhibit A, from an ad at Yahoo!, highlighting the importance of quotation marks to disambiguate passages:

Get Well – Spoil Her Spa Package                     $99.99

I am intrigued by the phenomenon of songs edited for broadcast, especially by the inconsistent application of rules.  My examples might best be addressed in a bulleted form:

• Everlast’s What It’s Like discusses at one point the abuse leveled by protesters at a young woman seeking an abortion.  In the line “They call her a killer, they call her a sinner, and they call her a whore,” (only) the word “whore” is deleted.
• A fascinating example for me is Disturbed’s Voices.  In the following passage the italicized words are deleted on MTV X:
  

  Wake up, are you alive?

  Will you listen to me?

  I’m gonna talk about some freaky shit now

  Someone is gonna die

  When you listen to me

  Let the living die, Let the living die

  Yes, only the one “die” is omitted.  I figure that that particular omission is post-Columbine paranoia: “Someone is going to die when they listen to him?  Isn’t he encouraging school shootings?”  The reasoning is sketchy but perhaps tenable.  So why in the world would they allow the following to remain in the song?

  Can’t you imagine how good going through this will make you feel

  I promise, no one will ever know

  There will be no chance of you getting caught

  They never loved you anyway

  So come on, be a man

  And do what you are compelled to do

• This is one that has annoyed me for a long time.  There is a fantastic Candlebox song entitled You that discusses the lyricist’s sadness at the effect of drugs on the world around him.  In the following passage, radio stations play a version that completely omits the section in bold.  This, in my opinion, ruins the point of the entire song:
  

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Take another line

  Won’t you feel it blanket your soul

  Out of mind

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Do another crime

  Won’t you get it higher and higher

  
  Roll through time

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Don’t you push your drugs in my face

  Yes, I’m feeling

  Feeling fine

  Don’t you push your drugs in my face

  Or I’m gonna put you in your place

  Fuck you

  
  I don’t want it no more

  And it’s mine

  Said this pain in my heart is all mine

  Yes, it’s mine all alone

• There is the phenomenon of not deleting lyrics that the censors don’t hear (or expect the audience not to understand.)  Predictably, this has happened more than once with Pearl Jam.  Yes, in Jeremy Ed clearly says “Seemed a harmless little fuck,” and this is duly deleted.  But less-than-perfectly-clear expletives in other songs remain intact: Given To Fly’s “But first he was stripped, and then he was stabbed by faceless men / Well fuckers, he still stands” remains in the broadcast version; Once, discussing how a mother’s abuse has turned her child into a serial killer and rapist, retains the lyric “You think I’ve got my eyes closed but I’ve been looking at you the whole fucking time”; and Not For You keeps “This is not for you. (x3) / Oh, never was for you / Fuck you / This is not for you”
• One of the most interesting is the following.  Kid Rock in Batwitdaba, obviously talking about heroin use, says “And it don’t even matter if your veins are punctured.”  Godsmack in Voodoo, obviously talking about heroin use, say “I’m not the one who’s so far away / When I feel the snakebite enter my veins.”  Godsmack keep their drug reference, Kid Rock loses his.
• When radio stations first began playing Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know, they deleted the predictable word in “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”  Only after the song had been on for six months or so did I hear them also deleting “go down on you” in “Would she go down on you in a theater?”

Are these choices the prerogative of the record companies or are they explicitly enforced through FCC regulations?  I do not know; please write me if you do.

I think I’ve been scammed.  In July I purchased a new Nokia PCS phone at Best Buy primarily due to their rebate offers.  I forget the exact details, but it was something like $75 from Nokia, $25 from AT&T, and a $50 gift certificate from Best Buy.  The rebate submission rules were complex.  Many different documents were required and no two rebates had the same requirements; one required the phone serial number, one required the AT&T phone number, etc.  Therefore I gave scrupulous care to quadruple-checking each submission.

Today on my way to work I checked my mail: Best Buy told me I had neglected to submit a photocopy of the phone’s UPC code (false) and asked me to resubmit it.  Conceivably this could be a clerical error, a data entry error, or something else innocent.  But I suspect that they might send everybody these letters hoping that the customers have thrown out the boxes after five months.  Fortunately for me I have not.  I will send this response with USPS delivery confirmation.

Anyone else have experience with this rebate?  Leave a comment and I’ll post it.

Modern Humorist, a very funny site, ran a feature called Holy Tango of Poetry subtitled “If Poets Wrote Poems Whose Titles Were Anagrams of Their Names”.

One of the poets featured is William Carlos Williams, a founder of the Imagist movement, who is best known (by far) for his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”.  If you have anything even remotely resembling a poetry anthology this is sure to be included because

1.  It is very good

2.  It is historically important

3.  It only takes up about three column inches

It is also notable because

4.  It leads a large number of college freshmen (who do not know the historical context) to decide that the chickens mentioned in the poem could successfully write modern poetry

Here is the poem (I’m sure a number of readers would be able to recite this by heart):

The Red Wheelbarrow

chickens.

Here is Modern Humorist’s Holy Tango poem for William Carlos Williams:

I Will Alarm Islamic Owls

and so dedicated to Allah

New Virus: Badtrans.B

This warning applies if you use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

There is a new Windows virus, called Badtrans.B, spreading rapidly through email (I have been hit three times in the past 24 hours.)  The email subject of the infected message will be simply “Re:”.  The email body will be blank but the message will contain an attachment with a double extension: filenames will resemble Pics.zip.pif and Humor.mp3.scr.  When the message is opened, Outlook will launch the Internet Explorer (IE) parser to render the message.  IE versions 5.01 and 5.5 (but not 5.01SP2) contain an exploitable MIME bug allowing arbitrary code to be executed without prompting the user; this is the route of infection.

The virus has two main effects.  First, it will email infected messages, using its own MAPI code, to email addresses found in cached web pages.  Second (and more seriously) it will install a Trojan horse keystroke logger; the logger will be in effect when the title of the foreground window begins with ‘LOG’, ‘PAS’, ‘REM’, ‘CON’, ‘TER’, or ‘NET’ (for ‘logon’, ‘password’, ‘remote’, ‘connection’, ‘terminal’, ‘network’, etc.) and the keystroke log will be mailed to one of the creator’s (or creators’) email addresses.  The keystroke logging code is contained in %System%\Kdll.dll.

• More info on Badtrans.B from Symantec
• More info on the IE MIME exploit

For fans of Google Holiday Logos, the creative variations upon the logo of the Google search engine to celebrate particular events, note that Google maintains an archive page of all previously used holiday logos.

The Guerilla News Network has a very well produced < 5 minute video on its site called “Countdown”.  Check it out.

The Public DNS at granitecanyon.com, who provide primary and secondary DNS for mcgees.org, joshuamcgee.com, ScotchFinder, and davidjmcgee.com, among others, seem to have all their servers down.

If you can read this page, and if you did not type in a numeric URL to get here, their servers are up again.

(This is a potentially unpleasant post, so skip it if you would like.)

Gatorade goes bad.  Logically there is no reason why it shouldn’t, eventually; it just had never occurred to me before that it would.  I keep a bottle of Gatorade in my car for when I get thirsty.  Last night I reached over, unscrewed the cap, and had swallowed three times before I could stop myself.  It was the consistency of mucilage or phlegm.  It did not taste hyper-revolting, which is a good sign, but it was certainly off.  When I got out of the car I held it under the light: it was a petri dish.  Black colonies were floating throughout the semi-liquid.  I was afraid last night that I would be taken ill; as of this morning nothing unpleasant has happened, and I count myself very fortunate.

Please keep this in mind regarding storage of Gatorade.

I visited the guitar again and copied down its vitals.  It is an Epiphone Les Paul Custom, ebony finish, gold hardware.  You can see a picture here.  I love this guitar.

Four excellent food products that you are unlikely to know about already:

1. Maine Coast Sea Vegetables Alaria: “Similar to wakame biologically and nutritionally, with a black or dark-green color. A more wild, yet delicate taste….”  This is delicious to eat raw, straight out of the bag; it may also be cooked for soups, salads, or boiled as greens.  The bag, by the way, is resealable and has “PLEASE RE-USE THIS BAG” printed on the front.  Kudos to them.
2. Whole Foods 365 Cola: Whole Foods have reformulated this beverage to use cane syrup as a sweetener; this imparts a delicious flavor reminiscent of the “microbrew” birch beers (birch beers are soft drinks, like root beers are.)  This product does not contain caffeine.
3. Kettle Chips Habañero Chili with Ginger Potato Chips: I think the name says it all: a creative flavor, and it is a well executed one as well.  The heat is present but not calibrated to blow your head off.  The ginger is restrained and adds a great undercurrent of flavor.
4. Health Valley Lentil with Couscous Soup: Presented as a Cup-o’-Noodles-style single-serving container, this is great to keep in a desk drawer at work for late nights.  It is far tastier and more nutritive than the cheap ramen cups; the seasoning emphasizes curry that fills the room with a delicious exotic aroma.

I just had the pleasure of watching the skateboarding vert finals of the 2001 Gravity Games.  What a great competition.  Rune Glifberg followed his second-run 92-plus score with an amazing and beautiful 96 point final run.  This truly has to be one of the most beautiful vert runs ever.  He stitched together five back-to-back technical tricks (including two 540s), he threw down a gorgeous full-extension Madonna, he pulled off a textbook-perfect tailgrab so flawless that it floored me to see it in the middle of a competition run.

The pleasure was not just the beautiful, technical and creative riding.  It was heartwarming to see, yet again, this community of sportsmen who are genuinely happy and congratulatory when a co-competitor beats them.  There is a tangible atmosphere of personal respect and nobility; the community feeling reminds me of Seattle musicians who consider sales to be after-thoughts and spend entire interviews endorsing other bands rather than talking about their own work.  If you are a skeptic please take some time and watch part (or all) of the next pro skateboarding competition: the level of skill and sportsmanship is sure to surprise and impress you.

Saturday evening I visited Instrumental Music here in Thousand Oaks to pick up a new set of guitar strings.  After I picked them out, Jenn was very patient and waited while I played around like a kid in a toyshop.  My gaze had fixed on a gorgeous black Les Paul, and I pulled it down and plugged it in.  When I first started picking through a chord I heard one of the worst mis-tunings I have ever encountered, made worse by the (intentional) distortion on the amp.  I’m going to see if I can give this explanation in a few sentences rather than my normal multi-paragraphs.  A guitar, as you may know, is usually tuned E-A-D-G-B-E, low to high.  This means that on a tempered scale the dashes in the previous list represent 5, 5, 5, 4, and 5 half steps, respectively.  Someone, presumably a beginner shopping at the store, had tuned the guitar with 5, 5, 5, 5, and 5 half steps, leaving the final tuning E-A-D-G-C-F.  This makes an E Major-shaped chord resolve as E-B-E-G#-C-F, giving us E-F dissonance (twice) as well as B-C dissonance, and generating what is surely one of the most revolting sounds known to man.  After I fixed the tuning it out sounded great.

I’m still thinking about it; this guitar is a beauty.  It lists for $1K, the shop carried it for $800, and I am now waiting on Guitar Center’s next “blowout sale”.  If I can get the price under $500 I can probably rationalize the purchase (Jenn, who will eventually read this post, might not agree that $500 is rationalizable.)

I have been surfing around reading more about these guitars, including a return visit to the indispensable Pearl Jam Rumor Pit, a site that is far more than its name would suggest.  Part of its role is apparently to give patronizing and dismissive non-answers to banal questions, as well as to questions that, while not banal, seem to suggest sarcastic answers.  Thus this rather amusing exchange from 3 August 1997:

Q: What type of strings does Stone [Gossard] use on his Les Paul?

A: Metal ones

While I’m on the topic, I want to share this passage from Ed’s gear page:

Q: I’m curious about Ed’s guitar setup and was wondering if you would mind
assisting me.  It’s widely reported that Ed doesn’t use effects pedals.  How does
he switch between clean and dirty tones in songs like “Not For You” and
“Corduroy”? …

A: You are correct that Ed typically does not use guitar effect pedals … At times [he] has experimented with using various distortion pedals, but one has never stuck – either because he wasn’t happy with the distortion, or because he doesn’t want to fuss with a foot pedal by his microphone stand.  On top of that, Ed’s really interested in guitars with distortion and/or effects built on-board the guitar, such as in the vintage, Italian-made Vox guitars that he owns.  With those guitars he can turn the distortion, and/or other effects, on and off at the flip of a switch right on the guitar itself.  It’s a pretty neat concept, but whereas the Vox guitars naturally sound O.K., they don’t sound great.  So far though, Ed’s never taken one of the Vox’s out on tour with him….

So if he uses no effect pedals live, and no Vox guitars live, then how does he get his distortion??  Well, it’s actually a little bit purer approach.  First of all, most of the time Ed plays his guitars using only the front (neck) pickup.  This pickup typically has a thicker, muddier tone due to its position along the length of the string.  And so with the positioning of that pickup, it’s a little easier to “overdrive” your amp with your strumming/picking technique.  Second, Ed sets his amp tone by first dialing in a loud, clean, full tone.  (Clean being the important word there.)  He adjusts his input gain right to the point where the “clean” tone is on the verge of distorting slightly.  Once this is set, his sound (clean or dirty) is controlled purely with his hands, changing with the intensity he chooses to strum the strings with.  If he picks more delicately, he can achieve a cleaner tone.  If he picks harder and more aggressively, he can achieve a distorted tone.  Cool, huh?

[Edited 04 Jan 2002] I am removing this post.  It dealt with my very angry feelings towards the website of a group of big-game hunters whom I had called “sadistic” and “murdering”, but it unnecessarily adds unpleasantness to the site.  If you are interested in the URL I was referencing, let me know by email.

There are games in which an element of chance is decisive, such as roulette or Snakes and Ladders: these games are appropriate only for children (if they are complicated) or for gamblers (if they are simple).

                  - J. Mark Thompson, “Defining the Abstract”

I am upgrading the Perl installation on a Linux machine.  The installation script is interactive, beautifully written, and sometimes very funny.  It just scrolled the following:

(Looks like you have stdio.h from Linux.)

Checking how std your stdio is...

Your stdio acts pretty std.

Anyway, I thought it was very funny.

I just saw the new Yahoo!/Pizza Hut advertisement using JavaScript animation.  If the ad is not showing on Yahoo! right now (you cannot miss it) I have cached a copy.  While I am loathe to admit liking something that could easily become a highly invasive advertising trick, this new ad works.  As long as the animations are under five seconds and the graphics under about 200×200 pixels, this is in my opinion preferable to pop-ups/pop-unders, at least until the novelty wears off.

I have written some fun software to solve Boggle games (this is the game in which six-sided dice labeled with letters are shaken in a plastic container to form an N x N array; the object of the game, in short, is to find paths through adjacent letters to form valid English words, subject to minimum length rules and a prohibition against using one die twice in a single word.)  The searches are very fast, even on this 266 MHz machine.  I just shook the game to get an array, as follows:

JFDER
GDARD
MWOTE
PTUCP
HILAH

A few seconds glancing gives me adder, water, actor, and rear/reared. 

I plugged the grid into the Boggle program, which found 363 matches in about one second, including the four I mention above.  Other notables that the program found include acuter, alcoate, capered, chaptered, outpaced, readout, rerouted, retouch, ulcered, and watered.  I might touch up the program a bit and release it as freeware, perhaps open-sourced under the GNU GPL.  Let’s see if there is any interest.

Here is a screenshot:

Longtime readers might remember the post from February of this year in which I questioned Match.com’s choice of this advertisement:

I expect that the photograph must be in Corbis or some similar database.  Consider this ad from the RealPlayer download page …

… and this ad from a magazine …

One last note before bed.  If you have a juicer, especially a good one like the Juiceman II, I recommend Granny Smith apple and red cabbage juice.  It is delicious.  The key to keeping it delicious, by the way, is the same for almost all freshly made juices: drink them within the first thirty seconds after they have been made.  If you do not believe me, try an experiment.  Make a glass of fresh juice, give it a quick stir, and then drink half the glass quickly while standing in the kitchen.  Then take the half-empty glass to another room, wait two minutes, and drink the rest.  It is startling how quickly some juices “crash”.  Get into a habit of drinking your juice while you stand next to the juicer and you cannot go wrong.

One time when I was in school I was seated in the office of my advisor, a brilliant and funny physicist.  In the middle of one of his sentences something on his whiteboard distracted him.  It looked much like this:

He started thinking out loud: “A, B, and pi-zero … A, B, and pi-zero … what was I doing?  Was I working on quantum mechanics?  What was … Wait!  That’s not a pi-zero!  That’s a goat!”  The professor had been explaining the “Monty Hall Problem” to a student earlier in the day.

Note: This post has been displaying strangely in some browsers.  I have made a change that I expect will make it render better.

I did not intend to write this post.  I sat down to compose a post on the Richard Dawkins book I just finished reading.  As I began to compose it I had need to add a hyperlink.  This is a bit of a pain in the neck (in terms of unnecessary typing) in Notepad++, a third-party replacement for Microsoft’s Notepad.  Since mid 1995 I have used one or the other to compose web pages.  It should be trivial to add a link in a web editing program: highlight the text, hit Ctrl-something, and type in the URL, preferably having the program fill in the “http://” for you if you leave it off (only if you leave it off; it should be smart enough not to turn your FTP URLs, for instance, into “http://ftp://ftp.microsoft.com”.)

In six-plus years I have not found a program to help me compose HTML that does not infuriate me through feature creep.  I want something bare-bones, at code level, that helps me with syntactic constructs.  I can handle the semantic stuff myself.  Prompted by this I went to Download.com to see what programs were ranked well.  The program I tried to download required me to supply a name and email address that they cross-their-heart-and-hope-to-die will not use for any purpose.  Right.  So I did what I usually do: I went to Mailexpire.com, typed in my real address, and it provided me with a Mailexpire.com email alias that will expire in twelve hours.  Take a moment and try it for yourself.

One does not really want to put a valid name down, either.  One can use something off the top of the head (I find this is frequently drawn from something in my field of view, what could be called the “Mrs. Doubtfire” approach) or use a random name generator such as the excellent one at kleimo.com.  Playing with it just now, with the “obscurity factor” set to 50 and gender set to “male”, I was offered Hal Tutas, Marlin Couser, Kendrick Guderjahn, Elwood Alessandro, and Jackson Sheild.  None of these names shows up in Google, by the way.  (The obscurity factor is fun to play with.  A setting of 1 ["common"] gave Martin Haviland [shows up in Google 5 times], Gary Verret [in Google 6 times], Lawrence Easter [26 times], Charles Flint [659 times], and Luis Grimaldo [58 times].  A setting of 99 yielded Wes Fosso, Cedrick Baresi, Jeromy Easlick, Rueben Alesse, and Alonso Egidio of which, predictably, none shows up in Google.)

But we already have a string literal to work with: the part of the Mailexpire address before “@mailexpire.com”.  One could try to make a name out of this; this has the arguable advantage of convincing a human screener, at least one who does not know how Mailexpire works.  Better yet, Mailexpire should buy, for instance, npqo.com, ncqn.com, and ofpi.com and randomly assign these domains to the email addresses, which would further convince a human screener.  The domain names I chose for this example, in case you are interested, are the result of hitting the keyboard randomly to generate a four-letter string and checking to see if the domain was reserved.  It took me twelve tries before I found a total of three unreserved four-letter .com domain names.  My sample is very small, so we cannot say with any confidence that 75% of four-letter domain names are already taken (maybe it was a fluke, or maybe my finger motions, for any of a number of reasons, preferred common sequences of letters when hitting “randomly”.)  But keep in mind that there are just under half a million four-letter domain names alone.  Have people really registered three quarters of these?

But back to making a name out of a Mailexpire address.  I just generated fifteen Mailexpire aliases, as follows: aroubtfuln, cliffectat, dravarrors, enroachink, hopelonalt, mumiosinev, myrtlyauei, neiteousic, peerledgeo, synodsuuoo, taphyseleo, turbidelpi, volishelty, welkindrew, wirelloned.  The intriguing thing to me about these is that they are clearly not random strings.  They are far to English-like, embedding words, parts of words, and (which may be the same as the last one) likely combinations of letters.  It belongs to the class of what Hofstadter describes as “English-sounding nonsense”.

Some of the names split easily into a first and last name.  Some present difficult juxtapositions of consonants.  I have a way that I deal with this (this sounds like a ton of work but it all happens very quickly in one’s head.)  In descending frequency, the order of vowels in English is much as you might expect: e-a-o-i-u-y.  What I do for a difficult name is to take the first consonant juxtaposition and insert an ‘e’ in between, take the next pair and insert an ‘a’, and so on; this makes it just believable that the email address could have been formed by removing letters from a too-long name.  Sometimes once the name is split it appears much better if the “first” and “last” names are swapped.

As if I were not spending too much time on an obscure topic already, here are my results on the fifteen names above:

Anyway, it may be fun to play with.  Alternatively, you could use Mailexpire.com to generate fictitious names for characters in stories and novels, for RPG NPCs, etc.