Holy cow!  Did I actually get this to work?  Wow.

If you see this message, you are on the brand new mcgees.org server, running Debian 3.0r2. If you can see this, I'm very pleased with myself.  If you can't see this question, please let me know by email.

Could the Bush Administration stand up against the combined forces of Howard Dean, John Edwards, John Kerry, Hulk Hogan, Mr. T, Christopher Reeve, Howard Stern, Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donell, Jessica Lynch, Fat Ass He-Man, and Jesus Christ?  I didn't think so.

The FCC Song (MP3), by Eric Idle:

Here's a little number I wrote the other day while out duck hunting with a judge
quack

Fuck you very much the FCC
Fuck you very much for fining me
Five thousand bucks a fuck so I'm really out of luck
Thats more than Heidi Fliess was charging me.
So fuck you very much the FCC
For proving that free speech just isn't free
Clear Channel's a dear channel
So Howard Stern must go
Attorney General Ashcroft doesn't like strong words and so
He's charging twice as much as all the drugs for Rush Limbo
so Fuck you all so very much

So fuck you very much dear Mr. Bush
For heroically sitting on your tush
For Halliburton, Enron, all the companies who fail
Lets send them a clear signal and stick Martha straight in jail
She's an uppity rich bitch, but at least she isn't male
So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you dickhead Mr. Cheney too.
Fuck you and fuck everything you do.
Your pace maker must be fake
You haven't got a heart
As far as I'm concerned your just a pasty faced old fart
And as for Condolezza she an intellectual tart
So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you very much the EPA
For giving all Alaska's oil away
It really is a bummer
When I can't fill my Hummer
The ozone's a no go zone now that Arnold's here to say,
"The nuclear winter games are going to take place in LA"
So fuck you all so very much

So what the planet fails
Lets save the great white males
And fuck you all so very much

quack

Great print quality on any paper, even sandpaper (up to 300 grit) … Quick printing at up to 9 pages per millisecond in black and 7 pages per hour in color

This is hardly a new sentiment, but as far as I'm concerned, Clear Channel can go fuck itself.

I was not able to install a new OS this weekend; mcgees.org stayed up, but that means it will be down some time later this week.

This weekend, mcgees.org and the other sites hosted by this machine will be out for extensive periods of time as I install a new operating system.  I'll post at the discussion page on the status.

Calpis concentrate.  Grey Goose.  Water.  Ice.  Combine at will.  Drink.  Yum.

If you want some fun and have Perl installed, download my Perl script fuck_with_the_scammers.pl and run it.  Some "phishers" sent me a fake PayPal message soliciting my email, PayPal password, credit card number, expiration date, CCV, and (get this) PIN number.  Hard to believe anyone would be stupid enough to fall for it.  Anyway, run this on your system and you'll give them 1000 randomly-generated entries to sort through.  It would be really useful if we could distribute this across multiple IPs.  You'll need my bigwordlist.txt as well, but that's fun to have anyway.

Pop quiz: Who's this? (Nudity)

No, it's not. It's this girl. (Semi nudity)

Another shot from the same shoot to strengthen the case. (Nudity)

But good grief, it's convincing, isn't it?  There's an entire possible career open for this "Emmie".

At least Fahrenheit 911 has a reference to a very interesting movie...hope Moore did something as good as the original Fahrenheit 451 which I recommend, excellent movie. — elpapacito

Let's just remember that Fahrenheit 451 was a book before a movie, k? — agregoli

And before that, it was a temperature. — soyjoy

Don Hewitt, of whom I'm no great fan, is retiring from 60 Minutes, of which I'm also no great fan.  I heard him on NPR yesterday talking in a highly opinionated fashion about the propensity of Americans to change the channel repeatedly and essentially "walk out" of the program; he compared the remote to "a gun".  He posed the following question: how many feature films have you walked out of in the theater?  He claimed that no one would be able to name five.  This is supposed to prove that we have "nothing invested" in television programs, compared to movies.

Well, I've walked out of four films, and I've fallen asleep in three others (post-childhood.)  I'm also a third his age.  Extrapolate at will.  I have a feeling others have comparable statistics.  So, if you're inclined, post at the board.

OK, if you're curious: I walked out of:

1. Trespass (1992, 5.9 stars at IMDB),
2. Hard Target (1993, 5.3 stars,  stars),
3. Natural Born Killers (1994, 6.6 stars), and
4. Starship Troopers (1997, 6.6 stars)

I fell asleep during:

1. The Ghost and the Darkness (1996, 6.4 stars),
2. The Core (2003, 5.5 stars), and
3. Cavale, aka On The Run, aka Trilogy:One (2002, 6.8 stars)

I had another nice microharvest today: four daikon radishes.  Pictures will follow.  The largest was over 30 cm long, and had a circumference larger than my wrist!  I know they can get to almost 50 kg, but this is still much larger than I had expected for my little garden patch.  From the four daikon I composted more than 2 kilos of foliage!  The plants were massive, and I realized I planted them much to closely, as the greens splay out in all directions.

As soon as I have a harvest, I start looking for people to give it to.  I enjoy eating it, but love the look on recipients' faces even more when I hand them home-grown produce.  I gave three of the four away; I'll keep one for misoshiru.  I need to pick up some bonito to make dashi.  I'm trying to decide which of my misos to use (store-bought, I don't make my own.)  My stomach's rumbling.  :-)

Quote 1: We [at Macallan] started back in … 1996 with an 1874 bottle which was, at the time, the oldest bottle of Macallan we'd been able to track down.  We'd bought it at auction … [and I] thought wouldn't it be a great fun to be able to taste a whisky that had been made all those years ago.  So we opened it and were amazed to find that it was similar — not identical — but similar to some casks we come across today. — David Robertson, Macallan distillery

Quote 2: The Scotsman has learned that far from being some of the oldest whisky in the world, the liquid inside the bottles [at Macallan's whisky museum] is not Victorian at all but dates from the late 1980s.…  After a year-long investigation by the Macallan board, during which sample bottles were sent to Oxford University for … testing, it emerged that the liquid content inside the bottles is "modern", in some cases as young as ten years old. — William Lyons, The Scotsman newspaper

Hmmm.  Maybe we shouldn't be entirely amazed that the "ancient" Macallans taste so modern.  (This is just speculation.  There is no hard evidence as of yet that the particular 19th century Macs used as templates for the replicas series were fakes.  And in any case, no one I know of is accusing Macallan of intentionally perpetrating a hoax — seems like they were scammed just like everyone else.)

For the Scotch collectors, Specialty Bottle has 50 ml glass sample bottles, with caps, for $0.28 apiece when you buy eight or more 12-bottle cases at a time.  This quantity discount essentially means you're getting 96 bottles for the 75 bottle price.  The price for eight cases, including shipping to California, is lower than the price before shipping and handling if you were to buy them from Essential Supplies.

(Scotch collectors use them to trade samples with friends or take specimens home from tastings.)

I had my first non-radish harvest from the garden today!  Here it is:

And the same thing, in the kitchen:

I just ate the baby carrot.  But I stir-fried the greens in olive oil, with fresh lemon juice and garlic, black pepper, and a dash of cayenne, and served them sprinkled with some fleur de sel:

I boiled the beetroots in salted water and ate them:

I had them with a glass of inexpensive white Cotes-du-Rhône.

I'm working on a gardening page, and with any luck will have in running in a few days.

Something's wrong.  I have been able to sleep for one of the last 38 hours.  I'm lying down, in the dark, trying to go to sleep, and I can't.  The only caffeine I've had is tea, about a liter, 18 hours ago.  I'm not taking any other stimulants.  I've even taken 15 mg of Ambien (I took 15 mg last night as well.)  It just slows my mental processes, it doesn't actually help me get to sleep.  It's like I'm in some perverse medical experiment in which critical parts of my brain have been removed.  My eyes are burning, my muscles are tired, but I cannot sleep.

I'm going to go brew a pot of a chamomile tisane.  I'm going to warm up my Chinese buckwheat hulls neck pillow that's laced with herbs that I suppose are supposed to do something.  It's a relaxation device, so maybe they're supposed to be relaxing herbs.  It's also a therapeutic device, so maybe they're analgesic herbs.  Or just "aromatherapy".  At this point I don't care that much, it will just be nice to have something warm on my neck.  I'll turn out the lights.  I'll put something quiet on the radio or television.

Wish me luck.  Post to the message boards with any ideas.

(I did finally end up getting to sleep.)

"Never ascribe to seething hatred that which can be adequately explained by simple contempt."

Sometimes e-lynchings in the blue are fun to watch.  Really, go grab a beer.  I feel no obligation to be tolerant of 111's bigotry, any more than I feel a need to be tolerant of Nazi propaganda.  Matt makes an interesting point that precisely because the post is so absurd, it does not need to be deleted.  I disagree.  Hate speech is not timecube, and while I'd support 111's right to march on public thoroughfares, I can find no justification for allowing it on a moderated site.

Overstock.com's prices on books are amazing!  They undercut Amazon on every item I wanted to buy.  I thought that there would be no way they could undercut $10.50 for Eats, Shoots & Leaves (that's 40% off list), but Overstock just wants $7.87 for it (55% off list).  Unbelievable.

What do you think Kenneth Starr's position on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance is?  Ready to be surprised?

Well, you won't be:

As the Cold War was unfolding, Congress added the words "under God" as a more complete and decidedly relevant statement of the nation's political philosophy. … [I]t will rightly be said that schoolchildren will doubtless feel peer pressure to participate in an exercise in which they (or their parents) emphatically disagree … [but the] answer is not to abolish the exercise itself.

Anton Chekov is a nicer guy than I would have expected.  I have a couple of complaints with his supporting large chain bookstores rather than the independent booksellers that drove his early success, but at least he was nice enough to give a reading.  A shame that B&N kicked him out.  I'm not the only one upset: a woman in the audience was "shocked" and "outraged" that they would evict an author who was trying to give a reading.  But it's OK, after being thrown out he was considerate enough to hold a book signing in Union Square.

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.  Read the page for details about the astute 11-year-old, as well as the student who apologizes to Chekov for missing his Central Park play last summer.

As someone with a fair amount of experience with tastings, I can assure you that the "New Cheerios" survey is completely plausible.

So many other bits to remark on.  Do you want to trade shoes?"  The time warp ("For the remaining five loops, I looked at my watch and said "5:25" at the exact same moment; it was now part of our sequence.")  Could you keep a straight face during these stunts?  I don't think I could, and I have improv experience.  And why do I find this wonderful and Tom Greene's antics deplorable? (I think it's because so many of Greene's bits have a strong thread of inherent cruelty to them, and these don't.)

I have a feeling that it should really bother me that I think this stunt would have been more impressive if the cupcakes were poisoned.  I mean, OK, not really, but in a fictional story, say.  No?  OK, well, forget I said anything.

A few unconnected notes:

1. Blogger has been redesigned.  Check it out.  You'll like the round corners.
   
   
2. I got a modified CueCat barcode reader in the mail.  Very cool, but I wish it would read in book UPC codes as ISBNs rather than UPCs.
   
   
3. I forgot how exciting it was to have auctions running on eBay.
   
   
4. The last post, my "feeling better" one, was the 500th mcgees.org post.

I'm feeling better, by the way.

A nice thing about PVC pipe is that while it does not break straight (i.e., the break is not a planar cut of the pipe), it breaks cleanly, as opposed to shattering, in that the two pieces will usually meet without major chips missing.  Another nice thing is that PVC cement is unbelievably strong stuff.  I broke a complicated loop of 1/2 in. PVC pipe off of a larger fixture in two places.  In one case, the break occurred inside another piece into which it was fitted:

|         
|============
|        -----------
|        _/________
|=========^==
|         |        
|         |location of break

Pulling it apart, adding PVC cement liberally to both mating surfaces, applying pressure, and liberally painting the outside of the joints with cement fixed the problem.  I wouldn't be surprised if it's stronger than it was before.

"He has attempted to purchase seven million hydrogen-powered doctors, and the Western wall of the Pentagon … And tonight I have a message for the people of Iraq: 'Go home and die.'"

I spoke too soon.  All my symptoms are back, and they're worse.

I've been sick for the last four days.  I missed work on Thursday and Friday with a bad cold.  Many of the cold symptoms have faded, but I think I've gotten a secondary ear infection on my congested ears.  I used to get them all the time, and this feels like that.  In a just universe adulthood would banish these pesky things.

Keep an eye on the actor Jason Dohring.  I just saw him in an otherwise poor episode of "Cold Case" and I was very impressed.  He had the same intensity that Edward Norton displayed the first time I saw him.  He's not lucky enough to have landed the same choice roles, at least not yet, but with any luck he'll get a chance to shine in a proper picture, as I'm not about to try to watch the vehicular stalker flick Black Cadillac (OK, I await my brother in law's response of "No, it was really good, rent it!")

He knows that night like his hand.
He knows every move he made.
Late shift, the bell that rang, a time card won't fade.
10:05 his truck pulled home.
10:05 he climbed his stair, about the time he was accused of being there.

But I'm not the man.
He goes free as I wait on the row for the man to test the rope he'll slip around my throat...
And silence me.

On the day he was tried no witnesses testified.
Nothing but evidence, not hard to falsify.
His own confession was a prosecutor's prize,
Made up of fear, of rage and of outright lies.

But I'm not the man.
He goes free as the candle vigil glows, as they burn my clothes.
As the crowd cries, "Hang him slow!"; and I feel my blood go cold, he goes free.