alright the endless loop of chuckling weasel even got to me
so now it's just a few times

yes that is a chuckling weasel. deal with it .

there is hopefully a new feature on the page today. I am not sure if it will stay or not. the idea is to have an embedded sound to set the mood while you read. the trick is finding one that will set the mood propwrly whilst not taking forever to download for you poor sad people not on broadband

didn't we all think it was just a little funny that they were targeting congresspeople as they were trying ram through that awful piece of jackbooted thug legislation.

As is often the case John McCain is showing signs of actually thinking. a very dangerous habit it a United States Senator. but my favorite quote is this one

Ethnic conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa are so numerous and complex that they defy comprehension, and staggering poverty is a constant source of instability. Although it is difficult to imagine the circumstances that might precipitate large-scale U.S. military involvement there, our recent experiences in Rwanda and Somalia demonstrate that so long as the region remains mired in poverty and ethnic conflicts, it will retain the capacity to involve the U.S. in limited ways.

11.99 plus shipping and handling. isn't this exactly what we pay shipping and handling for?

i've had to sit on this one for awhile. you see one of my heroes died recently. was murdered actually.

if you follow sailing stuff you will make sense of this. you see there was this cheeky kiwi. who put together financing and a crew and started doing amazing stuff. he crushed the records in the whitbread around the world race.(which has changed corporate sponsorship to volvo or some such) he bought and old tras atlantic racing multihull and won the jules verne trophy(sort of a spectacular race.start and finish line is drawn between france and england. pass south of all three capes. no stopping on land. that's the rules) he got really cheeky after that and put together an amazing crew to win the america's cup(they not only won it fair and square they had beck's Loser cranked on the stereo every day as the boat was towed out to race) all in all an amazing man but even more important that these things were the other things he did. he was actively involved in improving the education system in both his native land and his wife land. He stood up straight and honest in an arena which was previously dominated by lying cheating assholes(Dennis Conner, and Ted Turner for example.) he was a genuinely decent human.

last week he was murdered by pirate in brazil.

yes really.

murdered by fucking pirates.

there is a magazine that i subscribe to that actually keeps track of piracy accross the world. for the last several decades piracy has been something that mostly happened to large container vessels and usually withins a day's steaming time of China. It really hasn't been much of a threat to the average cruiser.

fuck

fuck

And on the geek front. i once again have a fully functional linux workstation. Graphics, soundcard everything!!!!. it is separate from the router/firewall box and is therefore allowed to have insecure things like an Xserver on it. i forgot how much linux kicks ass on the desktop. the noise you hear about how linux is unsuitable for the desktop is just plain wrong. and although i had switched to gnome just before circumstances forced me to give up the workstation I have now come back into the kde fold. kde 2 kicks ass too. the Gaim client for aol im is pretty spiffy. and opera is spiffnificent. (so for those of you look at your server logs you were not hit by Internet Explorer on linux. it was actually opera lying about itself(cuz it can)). check out icepack linux while it is not the distribution i am currently running it is just what most people need for a workstation. and not a lot of other stuff

no wonder this negotiating surrender thing is so difficult. Read the section on flags

For those of you who might be alarmed by dJd's use of the TWAT directory. RELAX, isn't that the natural acronym for The War Against Terrorism?

For those of you who enjoy batting around the ethical issues of stuff like a dead horse in the middle of a manhattan thoruoghfare. This issue of an american found in the Taliban's army is a complicated one. and resolving it will speak volumes about us as a people. the person who wrote the page i linked to is one i have known(if only in an online form) for quite a few years now. he is uniquely qualified to expound on the subject.

I got an email from one of the lists I'm on that reminded me of one of my favorite Greg Benford quotes.

"Under capitalism, man exploits man."

"Yes, comrade. And under communism it is just the other way 'round."

--Gregory Benford