Curse of the Day:
• May you be stuck behind a woman parking an SUV.

Just looking at my d2 site email now, and in the last 12 hours there are 77 emails, and my quick tally is about 10 real mails, 15 spam, and all the rest klez or other worm/virus-generated mails.  You people are grossly-infected, you use Outlook Express and don't have MS critical updates, you don't have a working anti-virus, and you don't care about the clutter in my inbox.  You! Don't! Care!  *sobs*

• This story is almost too funny to be true.  Not that I found it "funny", per se, I mean it didn't inspire any actual laughter, but it's so weird and perfectly male. Some Italian guy has caused hundreds and hundreds of auto accidents, almost all by having women rear end his car.  His scam is to say he won't file a claim, so the women give him their phone numbers and addresses, and make a cash settlement.  He then calls them for weeks or months asking them out on dates.

There's no word of any dating successes he might have had, but you'd think with 500+ trials, he must have gotten lucky a few times?  I kept expecting to hit the evil part of the article, where they discuss how 20 of the women have not been heard from in months or years; since with this level of obsession, you'd almost expect the guy to be a serial killer.  Apparently not.  Just horny.

• An article on condoms that discusses a new, smaller size for adolescents (is that even legal?) but also this, which I found amusing.

I find it hard to believe that anyone has problems not lasting long enough in a condom, but it seems that some do.  I tend to have the opposite problem when wearing them, tragically.

• A reassuring story of police corruption.

These are just the ones that have been so corrupt with it that they've been caught, mind you.  Most every cop has gone snooping out of curiosity, as has most everyone in the IRS, people at your bank, etc.  I'm not saying they're so evil for doing it; it's just normal human nature to be nosy and take advantage of greater access to information.  You just have to hope it's not used against you too badly.  Might be a moral in this for women (especially) who are considering dating a cop; when you break up, if he's unstable, he'll have no problem at all tracking you down and harassing you, and getting away with it; though they usually get caught after they murder you, if that's any consolation.

eep Throat; they mystery lives on.  Don't know what this means?  Don't care?

This article on CNN recaps the top candidates for the secret identity and gives some background information. I'm not sure how many people under 30, or outside of the US, have any idea who or what Deep Throat is, other than an old porno.  Some background info:  

The scandal began on June 17, 1972, with a foiled burglary of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington. Those caught in the act had connections to Nixon's campaign committee, and though Nixon won re-election that fall, Bernstein and Woodward's aggressive reporting kept the issue alive. In 1974, Nixon resigned.

As the 30th anniversary of Watergate nears, student investigators at the University of Illinois have concluded that Deep Throat, the White House source who helped journalists unravel the greatest political scandal in American history, was most likely conservative commentator Pat Buchanan.

I'd take exception to the "greatest political scandal in American history" part, since there were far bigger scandals in the 1800's and early 1900's, and there are other things we don't know about yet.  A couple of recent ones are Iran-Contra, where the US government sold weapons to Iran to get money to give to terrorists in Nicaragua, and the October Surprise in 1980, where people loyal to Reagan apparently collaborated to delay the US hostage release from Iran until after the election, so Jimmy Carter wouldn't get a late popularity boost.  Neither of those are fully-known about, since many of the documents that would shed more light, especially in terms of how high up the knowledge went (Bush pretended to know nothing about anything bad Reagan did, while claiming to be fully involved in everything popular) are still being held up from release, as The Freedom of Information Act states that they should be.  One of the first things Bush 2 did after becoming president in 2000 was to (illegally) block the release of many documents that would have revealed more of what people in the Reagan Administration were up to.  And I'm sure there are countless scandals that are even less known than these, all through US history, that will come out over time.

Anyway, how does this group of students arrive at Pat Buchanan as Deep Throat?

Working from an original list of 72 suspects, the students finally narrowed it to seven, then voted.

In addition to Buchanan, other likely candidates are speechwriter David Gergen, now a prominent journalist; White House attorney Jonathan Rose; head speechwriter Raymond Price; Stephen Bull, administrative assistant to President Richard Nixon; Fred Fielding, assistant to White House counsel John Dean; and Gerald Warren, deputy press secretary.

They kept expecting to find something that would rule Buchanan out, but never found it, so in the classic Sherlock Holmes style, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the answer.  Their investigation is interesting in another way, that they had some new info.  The students got ahold of a manuscript of All the President's Men, the book by Woodward and Bernstein that detailed their investigation.

...a copy of the original manuscript, which they compared with the printed book. On one page, an editor wrote a marginal note to Woodward: "Bob, too close to ID of throat here?"

The passage, which was dropped from the printed edition, characterized Deep Throat as "in a position to possibly understand the whole scheme and not be a potential conspirator."

Gaines' students interpreted that as meaning Deep Throat was a speechwriter or publicist rather than an official with a staff and policy-making responsibilities. Of their finalists, four were speechwriters or worked in the White House press office: Buchanan, Price, Warren and Gergen.

Salon was going to try to cash in on the whole mystery with an e-book revealing who Deep Throat was, but ran into um, factual problems...

The book is largely a fiasco because the candidate whom Dean originally intended to "unmask," a Nixon White House staff assistant named Jonathan C. Rose (whose father, Chappie Rose, provided Nixon legal assistance on Watergate), threatened to sue, and, in follow-up research, Dean "learned in confidence from 'a highly reliable [but apparently second-hand] source' that Rose was not Deep Throat."

It seems likely that the debate will go on for some time.  There is nearly unanimous agreement that Deep Throat was a real person; one person, not a composite of sources, or something invented for narrative effect in the book (All the President's Men) Woodward and Bernstein wrote about the events.

Woodward and Bernstein have said they will not reveal who it was until the man dies or gives them permission to reveal it.  Which means we might get to wait decades yet, by which time it'll really be hard to find anyone who still cares about the issue.