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Disks in Rotation: Books Lying
Open What's For Lunch? Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
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Sunday May 5, 2002 |
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of the Day This "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. -- Western Union internal memo, 1876 |
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Daily
Blog Spider Man has opened and it's on track to make the most money in a weekend that any movie ever has. BoxOfficeMojo reports that it made $41.4m Friday, and is on pace for over $100m for the weekend. I've not really paid any attention to the movie, so this surprises me. I figured it would do well, but I've not had any thoughts of wanting to go see it, so therefore figured other people were indifferent to it also. I thought the first teaser trailer was crap, and the current full trailer is unremarkable. Oddly, I loved Spiderman as a kid. X-men were my favorite comic book, especially Wolverine 'cause he was all tough and nihilistic, but Spiderman was probably my next fave. I read most of them as they came out, but I was probably 10 or so at the time. I remember around then watching the Spiderman cartoon religiously when visiting my grandparents over the summer, and even some of the live action show. It was terrible, I think I realized that even then, and every episode seemed to have him fighting ninjas. Yes, Ninjas in New York, or whatever big city he inhabited. So I'm not sure why the movie isn't interesting me more, when obviously a lot of other people are gagging to see it. It's getting generally very good reviews, 84% "fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, which is amazingly high for a stupid action movie. Maybe I'll bestir myself to go see it sometime next week, though I can't imagine I'll care strongly enough, like or dislike, to have it worth the trip. On to the odd links, which I like to call "news". Wikipedia. Looks like a fascinating site, if you can ever get a page to load. Funny school news. Not about absurd over-reaction suspensions either, for once.
If you've got your email on a website anywhere, you're probably familiar with the godawful amount of spam you get. This isn't the only problem now, since Klez is wreaking havoc, and causing dozens (or hundreds) of bullshit emails to appear daily. The really annoying thing about Klez is not the amount of mail it forwards, lots of viruses come and go that do that, since MS Outlook Express sucks everything bad you can think of to suck. (This is so my inbox. I've gotten literally every mail there but the foreign language one at least 20x each the past week.) But Klez adds to the fun by taking the sender of an email in the virus victim's inbox, and putting that as the "reply to" line in the outgoing virus mails. So you mail person X, they have Klez, it triggers them to send the virus to 40 people in their address book with your name and email as the "reply to". So 40 people think you are sending them the virus, when you might be totally virus free. You can look at the "return path" line in the email header to see where a mail actually comes from, but lots of users don't know how to even display full email headers, and don't bother to if they do. On the D2 site we all mail a lot of people, replying to questions and such mostly, and lots of those people have Klez, so Elly, Gaile, Rush, and myself are constantly getting emails that appear to be from each other, with various bizarre Klez subjects. This one came to me tonight, and I found it funny.
The actual sender was some guy in Australia, who has Klez on his computer. Elly never sends me gay porn in email. That's what ICQ is for, after all. LegoDeath has some very funny stuff. As the name might indicate, it's a site with Lego block constructions, but showing torture devices and other grim fare. Though it's hard to be too grim with those cute little figures and pegs sticking out of every wall. The 4th one in the Occupational Hazards was my favorite. The most popular picture on British Yahoo now is this one, and it's pretty funny. Now how exactly dancing naked on a fountain while an equally-naked guy plays the bongo protests anything is open to debate. |
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I'd say that death exists if you get killed by a homemade pipe bomb some asshole put in your mail box, but probably that's just what the world powers want me to think. Saturday five more bombs showed up in mailboxes in Nebraska, apparently identical to the first batch, and at least one had an identical note in it. There were no reports of injuries or explosions in these, so either they didn't work, weren't armed, or people got very lucky. The bombs are all being planted in very rural areas, as this photo shows. Out in the goddamn sticks, would be another way to say it. Where no one is likely to drive by and see you planting the bomb, and people can't see the mailbox from their home. My grandparents live in Missouri, and driving around there you often see little side dirt roads with a cluster of 10 or 15 mailboxes all together, to make delivery viable for the postal service, since most of the houses are alone out at the end of a mile or two dirt road, and the people pick up their mail at the end of the day, coming home from work, usually. In other words, the bomber is picking his targets well, as the fact that he was able to plant around a dozen bombs and not be seen doing it (assuming it's a single person doing it). It'll be interesting to see what's going on with this. There are a lot of anti-government fanatics in the US, and maiming postal workers isn't any sort of hang up for them. Timothy McVey killed hundreds of federal workers in the OK City bombing, after all. This guy/group is obviously looking for attention, not trying to murder, as the non-lethal bombs and notes show. A few years ago this would have been incredibly big news in the US, with commentators going nuts that something like this could happen in the land of the free, etc. However after OK City, and the 9/11 events, a few mailboxes in the Midwest is hardly even news. I don't really have any commentary on this, it's just a really weird and upsetting story that's unfolding right this minute. No matter how you feel about the terrorist's motivations or opinions, imagine walking out to your mailbox and having your hand blown off? Or pretend you're a postal worker, just doing your job, and some bomb goes off and maims you. How would you go back to work, knowing that you'd have to open hundreds of mailboxes a day? |
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