Although Squiggy is right that the one is identifiably better than the other, in my opinion he is not ENOUGH better to be worth a large personal effort on my part. So although I continue to stand against some of the obvious smears, I will not be campaigning for him in Virginia. His 180 on FISA indicates that he is a full member of The Invertebracy.

Meanwhile, although McCain has done his best to disguise himself, he is in fact Not Bush. Therefore, the difference between the two does not exceed epsilon for my purposes.

After playing the electrical college game at 270toWin, I have come to the conclusion that whoever wins Virginia in November will be the next President. Please note that I predicted the same about Ohio in 2004. Suppose I should do some voter registration there this summer. Anybody want to join me?

1. "FREE" stuff (in exchange for "participating in member offers")
2. QuizRocket (jumping Jebus on a pogo stick, QuizRocket is evil)
3. GlobalWarmingHeartland and other "climate facts" sites
4. Expelled (Ben Stein's pro-creationism movie)
5. snitch on your company to the BSA

Someone needs to pay the ISP bills for the websites that I like to use. I'm much happier knowing that it's those folks.

Today I spent a few minutes in blogsearch about Mike Gravel switching to Libertarian. One of the blogs I pseudo-randomly browsed was "That's Right Nate". His views on Gravel were similar to mine (assuming he was being sarcastic about the New Deal being Libertarian), so I decided to read on. That's when I came to this:

Re-read that last sentence a few times. Nate prayed about these two opposing narratives before picking one to believe. He apparently continued to believe Rove's version right up to this week. The notion that one could find objective truth to support one story or the other never even crossed his mind.

I had always assumed this sort of behavior was (other than perhaps GWB himself) just a caricature. To see an ordinary person honestly making political decisions from his gut^H^H^HGod was appalling. It brought my opinion of the average US citizen to a new low.

I definitely need to rent Idiocracy ASAP.

I'm drafting the playlist for my neighborhood summer cookout (5th party so far, 4th with music, 3rd with a preplanned playlist). I've laid out a theme but need to about double the duration. So, I have two questions:

1. Have any song suggestions that fit the music style? (current list follows)
2. Is there a better site to ask this, like slashdot journal but for music?

2008 Block Party:

• Jesus Of Suburbia - Green Day
• Club America - The Cure
• People Are People - Depeche Mode
• They - Jem
• Television, the Drug of the Nation - The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy
• 16 Military Wives - The Decemberists
• Welcome To The Occupation - R.E.M.
• I Should Be Allowed To Think - They Might Be Giants
• The Bottom Line - Big Audio Dynamite
• Imagine This (Bush) - Wax Audio
• Better Way (War Mix) - Ben Harper
• Revolution - The Beatles
• Talkin' Bout a Revolution - Tracy Chapman
• Yell Fire - Michael Franti & Spearhead
• Children Of The Revolution - Baby Ford
• Freewill - Rush
• Free - Phish
• I'm Free - The Soup Dragons
• The News - Carbon/Silicon

If somehow Hillary manages to pull a victory, I can't think of a more appropriate symbol of American ingenuity and resolve than: both Hillary and McCain picking Joe Lieberman as their respective running mates. It would be fabulous!

Alternately, we could all just skip past the next 8 months of ugliness straight to President-Elect Obama. Please. Either way would be fine.

p.s. Any thoughts on Obama's running mate? John Edwards? Ron Paul? Arianna Huffington?

1. Hillary Clinton maintains her faux-mentum and sweeps the delegates!
2. Rudy Guiliani makes a shocking comeback and 9/11s his way to nomination!
3. Mike Bloomberg throws his moneybag into the ring!

Now all I need to do is figure out their running mates, and some scenario where Bloomberg gets a nonzero number of electors.

Purely for the aesthetic symmetry of it, I'd want HRC to win a one-term Presidency: Bush 88, Clinton 92, Clinton 96, Bush 00, Bush 04, Clinton 08. Then either she declines to run again (maybe Bill keeps sleeping with her interns) or, preferably, she loses the 2012 primary to a Neo-Dem upstart.

Larry Craig trying to play pass the potato has finally crystallized the answer to a question that has been floating around the back of my head for many years now. Why do so many social conservatives believe that being gay is a choice?

ANSWER: because for them, it really is a choice.

Way back in college I completed most of a minor in Psychology (then transferred schools and did most of a minor in CS, then decided to just graduate rather than finish either, but I digress). The key point my favorite Psych professor stressed about sex was that orientation is not a boolean toggle. It's a continuous set, bimodally distributed with a large hump near the hetero end, a smaller one on the far side, and a non-zero curve joining the two. (FWIW, I express this mathematically because that was my major; she taught it with friendly illustrations).

For most of us, preference is just a hard-coded trait. We might feel an outlier twinge once in a while, but it's not enough to act upon or even worry about. But imagine what it's like for folks toward the middle of the spectrum, who find themselves attracted to both genders on a recurring basis. Among the Reality-Based Community, such a person might accept being bi and have a good time. However, for someone whose gut tells them that devout belief supersedes pesky facts, wow, this is a serious problem!

And so we end up with hundreds of these conflicted souls entering politics, publicly proclaiming their choice of heterosexuality, while covertly looking for cock in bathroom stalls. Almost makes me feel sorry for them. Almost.

While browsing for disinformative comments to downmod, I came across this likely candidate.

Take a casual glance at http://www.google.com/search?q=canada+nickel+dead-zone+nasa and you'll see the obvious fingerprints of a dittohead smear campaign. However, the question is ... is it false or not?

My searches didn't find any factual reports about nickel mines in Canada; either the story doesn't exist or it's completely overshadowed by the turd blossoms. Anyone else have better sources?

So here we are, four months into the first year of Apple Inc, and they are living up to the name change. I didn't realize the utter non-extent of it until I opened the latest version of MacTracker, clicked 2007 in the Timeline, and found exactly THREE entries:

1. AirPort Extreme (802.11n)
2. Apple TV
3. Mac Pro (8-core)

That's the complete list of product revisions since last year. Not even an iPod Gig-bump or an inch of display. Exactly one Mac update that's only of use to a handful of high-end pro artists. Meanwhile, Centrino Duo is here, and everyone else's models are zooming ahead. Several of them offer internal cameras now, BTW.

There hasn't been a year with this few announcements since ... hmm ... 1998. Lord Steve really believes iPhone is going to be as big a hit as iMac and iPod were. Dammit, I don't care about that, gimme my MacBook Santa Rosa!

Apropos of nothing: My kids love those repetetive decrementing-verse songs, so I hear them way too much. This variation has been going through my head for a while, and I felt like sharing:

Five little monkeys jumping on the bed,
one fell off and bumped his head,
mother called the doctor and the doctor said,
no more monkeys jumping on the bed!

Four little monkeys jumping on the bed,
one fell off and bumped her head,
mother called the doctor and the doctor said,
are your monkeys jumping on the bed?

Three little monkeys jumping on the bed,
one fell off and bumped his head,
mother called the doctor and the doctor says,
I'm reporting you to Social Services!

Two little monkeys jumping on the bed,
one fell off and bumped her head,
doctor called the copper and the copper said,
no more mother jumping on her kids!

One mother monkey in a jail house bed,
slapped around by her cell mate 'Ed',
mother called the doctor and the doctor said,
no more monkeys jumping on the bed!

Ever since the first story about kidnapper/astronaut Lisa Nowak, I've had this gnawing Deja Vu. Her enigmatic mugshot just kept on reminding me of... someone. Disheveled brown hair, bleary eyes, je ne sais quoi... who was she? Actress? Long-ago girlfriend? Who?

Yesterday, at long last, it hit me. That picture is a many-years-older... more-strung out... Ellen Feiss!!! C'mon, try to tell me you don't see it too. A few quick searches didn't turn up anyone else mentioning this resemblance. You heard it here first; pass the word.

My organization just rolled out its new site design (which includes a good chunk of moved pages), and I just upgraded my copy of Danny Goodman's _Dynamic HTML_ to 3rd edition ("updated for Ajax and Web 2.0"). So I quickly realized we should have an AJAX script on our 404 pages. Parse the given URL, apply some heuristics, test a half-dozen candidate addresses, forward user to the best match.

Except that somehow I haven't found any prebuilt libraries for this. It *is* an obvious idea, right? I suppose I'll roll my own if necessary, but a system like this really ought to exist already. And I absolutely agree with Douglas Karr that the grandmasters at Google are blatantly falling down on the job by not catching their 404s more effectively.

I renewed my phone contract today; I finally have one with a camera. It also has a USB port for syncing with computers... which is disabled by Verizon (but of course they will transfer our files over their network for a low low fee).

I see various gray market entities selling unlocker software. Anyone care to share their experiences with this sort of thing? Where are good places to find phone hacks? What do they typically add/change? What do phone companies do to detect/deter/destroy unlocking? etc? Any helpful pointers would be appreciated.

My efficient (but not trusty) Golf TDI went to the shop yesterday for brakes and a timing whatever, so the dealership gave me a loaner. I turned on the radio and saw that the buttons were set to a mix of "christian" talk and pop "music". I say music in quotes because, well, have you tried listening to any of these stations during rush hour? There is no music. Their various corporate owners (aka Clear Channel) uniformly decree that in order to save on royalty payments, there should not be any actual music played at peak traffic times. (This is true, BTW).

With my faith restored in the utter idiocy of western consumer culture and its "human" populace, I quickly reset 5 buttons to my standard list:

1. WYPR, Baltimore NPR
2. WAMU, Washington NPR
3. WTMD, College Alternative
4. WBJC, Public Classical
5. WRNR, Indie Rock, sadly low wattage

This effort reminded me how thoroughly disgusting it is that I can only find 5 significant options in a fully saturated double-metro-area radio market. I decided then that I absolutely MUST find a home channel for the elusive sixth button. It used to belong to WHFS (formerly Indie Rock, then conglomerated, lobotomized, replaced by Spanish-language Pop/Dance, last brought back on another frequency as a zombie imititation of its former life), but I ended up realizing that inter-channel static was more enjoyable. The Seek button in the loaner car is large enough that I could press it easily without looking, so I spent my morning commute surfing for one more station preferable to pounding my forehead with a hammer.

I had expected to write this journal in the negative, assuming my mission would fail. But it seems my Reverse Murphy effect struck again, because a plausible candidate went on air LAST WEEK. Apparently a corporate drone had a lightbulb moment... a compact fluorescent one, in fact. Apologies to all the classic rock fans whose beloved Arrow has been smashed, but I'm giving this new "green rock" format a chance. If their morning DJs don't blather at me like schizophrenic meth-addicted Stern wannabes, I think we'll get along pretty well.