You probably can't make it out at this size,
but the mannequin head is showing off a tongue stud

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Sic'em!
Howard Dean had some choice things to say about Boy Emperor in the Times [requires registration] today:

“I think what the president is doing is setting the stage for the failure of America... If you look at what's happened to other great countries, they get in trouble when they can't manage their money — and this president's certainly proven himself adept at that — and they get in trouble when they overstretch their military capabilities... he has a black and white view of the world, and foreign policy depends on enormous understandings of nuances and trade-offs... The most important criteria for whether you're going to be any good at foreign policy or not is judgment and patience, both of which are in short supply in this presidency... The president and his neocon advisers decided they were going to teach the North Koreans a lesson, and unfortunately, North Korea has the power to inflict a fairly painful lesson on us...”

My Mom called this morning, and asked about the origin of the abbreviation "lb" for pound. I figured it was from Latin, but I had no idea what the latin word might be. It stands for libra, an ancient Roman unit of weight. It's also the origin of the British pound sign, but how weight and money got entangled, I don't know, either. Then, there's the $, which probably comes from a representation of the Spanish pieces of eight, while the name derives from Dutch or German.

While I was thinking about it, I decided to look up the word for this character: /. The slash (which many of my friends insist on incorrectly referring to as a backslash!) actually has several names: solidus, oblique dash, or virgule, take your pick. It's also known as a forward slash to distinguish it from the backslash (\), which only has one name.

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Well, California just added another chapter to the history books. I don't think we have any idea of the implications of what's happened.

Extraordinary artwork presented with a fun and unusual flash interface at esao.net [click "enter," not the pic, to get into the site.]

Some parts are still under construction - incentive to come back again.

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“I can tell you that $150,000 per song is not reasonable, and that's technically what you can put in front of somebody.” - Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)

Another republican who's not automatically siding with the big guys – how refreshing! Coleman plans to push legislation to reduce penalties for downloading copyrighted songs off the Internet, and to allow for judicial review in cases where the current Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows the industry to obtain subpoenas without a judge's signature. Just in case you were wondering, those high CD prices paid lawyers more often than they paid musicians.

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Packin' (detail from a street poster)

Halloween's coming... What r u wearing?

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Yeah, I feel more secure...
I could have figured when Rumsfeld started making noises about building “low-yield thermonuclear devices,” that we'd probably start hearing about efforts to gear up to produce bombs again. Well, today I found out that the the Watts Bar nuclear plant will begin generating tritium – the material that is the basis of “hydrogen bombs”, and is described in one article as a gas that “enhances the explosive force of nuclear weapons” – by inserting special collector rods into a civilian reactor. Using civilian reactors for such a purpose has long been considered a taboo.

I was all set to nail Bush & Co for pulling a fast one, but it turns out the groundwork was laid during the Clinton Administration. Much in the same way that Bill got creative in defining “sexual relations,” the government maintains that using a civilian reactor to produce tritium doesn't really violate the spirit of separating atoms for peace and atoms for war, because you can't build a nuclear bomb with tritium alone. Besides, the tritium is needed to maintain existing stockpiles, not make new weapons.

They say that now. I have visions of huge scorch marks dotting the face of the Earth some years from now... All in the name of “national security.” But, hey, I'm sure the results in California tomorrow will go a long way toward restoring my faith in the leadership of this country – It could happen.