I got seasons 3 and 4 of Homicide on DVD, and I’ve been like a kid in a candy store the past few nights.

“[Phoebe] may be our first encounter with a Kuiper belt object.”

There are five new baby pictures, at the bottom of the list.

The new garden page isn’t ready yet, but I wanted to share with you the absurdity that is the kabocha squash plant. It now has seven squashes growing on it. Keep in mind that all the pictures are from a single plant, started outdoors from a single seed.

Here’s a fantastic interview with Maynard James Keenan by, of all people, Kurt Loder.

You have got to be kidding me.  They really presented a gold-plated money clip to the people who filed past Reagan’s sealed casket at the Presidential Library?  Seriously.  Not a David Cross routine.  Real life.  I’m not making this up.  A gold-plated money clip.

Good to know that you didn’t have to be there to get one, though.  Follow the link above to buy one on eBay.  Greed Is Good®, right?

My workplace in Thousand Oaks closed early today, as the only route of egress was the motorcade route. We’d have been locked in a research facility with a jammed soda machine and only sputtering chambers and broadband connections to entertain us.  Sounds like an Fox sitcom premise, when you think about it.

The motorcade was scheduled for evening, but at 11:30 a.m. people were lining Lynn Road (I swear I am still not making this up) with padded folding chairs, sunglasses, tacky beach visors, and red Igloo coolers of Diet Coke. When I left, I saw more of the same, along with hordes of miniature people born during Clinton administrations I and II — and someone had thoughtfully gone through and placed red, white, and blue helium balloons around the route.  It was packed like Disneyland on the Fourth of July weekend. Northbound 101 was jammed with cars for miles; driving past I felt like Judd Hirsch in Independence Day, hauntingly feeling like I was somehow going the wrong way.  Southbound 101 was accessorized with hovering military helicopters armed with fucking missiles.  For real.  This is still real life.

“A tiny bottle of Scope is a lousy substitute for a real vagina, especially when you are traveling.” (safe for work)

This guy takes requests for songs to write and record. The preceding bit consisted of excerpts from a song that is the opposite of a diss track. He also undertakes severely constrained writing assignments, such as writing a Christmas song about falling down the stairs using only words beginning with B, E, M, P, and S: “Similarly my back’s sore probably pained ever since sliding so effervescently past seventy stairs … So everybody better buy me some super excellent presents.” But that’s not quite as cool as the constraints on False Impersonation — read the Songs To Wear Pants To page for details.

If you’re setting up sendmail, this page should help.

The Big Bird Theory of Education: “It’s easier to remember a new idea if it’s attached to an eight-foot yellow bird.”

It’s interesting how people will get fixated on a specific and forget the general. In the evenings, I’ll go in to check to see if the baby’s still breathing, a reflex the parents out there will probably understand. I’ll usually leave the light off so that I won’t disturb him. Just now I went in to check, feeling for him in the relative dark, but he was tossing and turning. I thought, geez, I wish he’d stop moving so that I could tell if he was still breathing or not.

New pictures of him are available.

Dewey Beats the Tampa Bay Lightning

One wonders just how much journalism is composed and never published. Last weekend, when Reagan died, the networks were ready with graphics and retrospectives that I assure you were not assembled in four hours. The death of Reagan, at least, is predictable, but sports and politics wins aren’t. How much must be relegated to the trash-heaps of history.

In November 2003 I was in a traffic accident. I had to come to a quick stop, but the two people behind me didn’t react fast enough. I was hit by the car behind me, which was in turn hit by the car behind it. I ended up in physical therapy for a month. One of the cars was insured by the relatively expensive State Farm, who have been nothing but professional through the whole process. The other was car was insured by fly-by-night “specialty insurance” provider Viking, part of the Royal & Sunalliance group, where “specialty” is a euphemism, according to their website, for “mandatory coverages for customers who are less able to afford auto insurance”. Viking has had three BBB complaints in the last 12 months, which the BBB lists as “satisfactory”.

There’s one more piece of data you need to know. A while back I ran into a fault with my Audi. There’s a design flaw in which front bumpers will get caught on parking lot obstructions and tear off (I mentioned this problem here.) Audi quoted me a price of $1300 to repair it, but shortly after I received the quote I received a letter from the lawyers pursuing a class action to get this very issue resolved, so I held out. When the accident occurred, I was missing a front bumper, but this had nothing to do with this case. I wasn’t making a claim for this damage. The insurance adjuster estimated the damage to my rear bumper at $700.

I have been in communication with adjuster Dawn, who has been out of the office for long stretches of time. I got in touch with her today, and these are the highlights of the conversation, from memory. It’s surreal.

Dawn:  We’re offering you $x.

Josh:  That’s lower than what State Farm offered.  Lower by 100%, actually.

Dawn:  But this was a minor accident.

Josh:  Well…

Dawn:  This was a minor accident, and you had previously been in another accident that damaged your front bumper.

Josh:  That wasn’t an accident, that was my bumper getting caught on a planter in a parking lot while I was backing up.

Dawn:  But it did more than $1000 damage to your car.

Josh:  Yes.

Dawn: It was obviously more serious. It did $1000 damage to your car, and you weren’t injured, but you were injured during this $700 accident? I don’t see how that could be.

Josh:  You’re not making any sense.

Dawn:  Well, that’s your opinion.

Josh: No, that’s not just my opinion. Look, if a baseball hit my car and shattered my windshield, and the windshield cost me $1000 to replace, would you consider that a more serious accident than the impact?

Dawn:  You’re comparing apples and oranges.

Josh:  Exactly.  You’re comparing apples and oranges.

Dawn:  But you did $1000 damage to your bumper.

Josh:  They’re completely different.  In one I was driving, in the other I was backing up in a parking lot.

Dawn:  But you weren’t driving when you were hit [by our insured].  You were stopped.

Josh:  The other guy sure as hell wasn’t stopped!

Dawn:  Well, he was coming to a stop, and didn’t brake fast enough.  At least that’s what you told us.  [Switches to dramatic voice:] Or is that what happened?

Josh:  No, that’s what happened.  We’ve been over this, lots of times.

Dawn:  OK, then.

[more bizarre exchange…]

Josh:  [Starting to laugh:] Look, I know full well that you may know what you’re saying is nonsense and that you’re just trying to screw with me, and that’s fine.

Dawn:  [Getting flustered:] Well, what do you want?  Let’s talk about that.

Josh:  $y [where y = 2 times x; that's the amount State Farm paid]

Dawn: Well, I don’t have your file right now, it was taken by an auditor. But call me back on Monday, and I’ll see what I can do.

Josh:  [Laughing:] OK.

Dawn:  Bye.

Josh:  [Still laughing:] Bye.

My XP box is unstable. My Linux box is slow. That gives me the choice of fast, unreliable browsing or slow, predictable browsing. I’m downloading Opera to see if that speeds things up a bit on the Linux box.

October 25, 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Intruder in Duluth

At around midnight on October 25, a guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center saw a figure climbing the security fence. He shot at

it, and activated the “sabotage alarm.” This automatically set off sabotage alarms at all bases in the area. At Volk Field, Wisconsin,

the alarm was wrongly wired, and the Klaxon sounded which ordered nuclear armed F-106A interceptors to take off. The pilots knew there

would be no practice alert drills while DEFCON 3 was in force, and they believed World War III had started.

Immediate communication with Duluth showed there was an error. By this time aircraft were starting down the runway. A car raced

from command center and successfully signaled the aircraft to stop.  The original intruder was a bear.

— Alan F. Philips, 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War.

Also see the Wikipedia for a man who should have statues in every major world city: Stanislav Petrov, the man who prevented World War III.

ASCII Art Stereograms.  For real.  The fact that this is possible makes my brain hurt.

The foreboding message on the answering machine was, “I’m with the Secret Service. Please call me at….” Since I created the problem, not my lovely wife, I agreed to call them back. They told me the bill was good, but they wanted to know where she got it. I fessed up and told her she got it from me, and that the reason it showed up as bad was because I had starched it. She asked me why I did that. I told her it was all wrinkly and I wanted it to be nice and crisp.

(Note added 14 June 2004: *sigh*  It’s not me, folks, that’s why it’s in a blockquote and why there’s a link to someone else’s site.  Note the hyperlink on the text “wanted it to be nice and crisp” — that will take you to the full story.)

On another topic, thanks for the people who have let me know that the menu of links is not working. For some reason SSI are not working on the new system; I haven’t figured it out yet. Any experts among my readers want to review my Apache 2.0 httpd.conf?

(Fixed.  Gee, it helps if I’m editing the right httpd.conf, doesn’t it?)

Holy cow!  Did I actually get this to work?  Wow.

If you see this message, you are on the brand new mcgees.org server, running Debian 3.0r2. If you can see this, I’m very pleased with myself. If you can’t see this question, please let me know by email.

The FCC Song (MP3), by Eric Idle:

Here’s a little number I wrote the other day while out duck hunting with a judge

quack

Fuck you very much the FCC

Fuck you very much for fining me

Five thousand bucks a fuck so I’m really out of luck

Thats more than Heidi Fliess was charging me.

So fuck you very much the FCC

For proving that free speech just isn’t free

Clear Channel’s a dear channel

So Howard Stern must go

Attorney General Ashcroft doesn’t like strong words and so

He’s charging twice as much as all the drugs for Rush Limbo

so Fuck you all so very much

So fuck you very much dear Mr. Bush

For heroically sitting on your tush

For Halliburton, Enron, all the companies who fail

Lets send them a clear signal and stick Martha straight in jail

She’s an uppity rich bitch, but at least she isn’t male

So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you dickhead Mr. Cheney too.

Fuck you and fuck everything you do.

Your pace maker must be fake

You haven’t got a heart

As far as I’m concerned your just a pasty faced old fart

And as for Condolezza she an intellectual tart

So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you very much the EPA

For giving all Alaska’s oil away

It really is a bummer

When I can’t fill my Hummer

The ozone’s a no go zone now that Arnold’s here to say,

“The nuclear winter games are going to take place in LA”

So fuck you all so very much

So what the planet fails

Lets save the great white males

And fuck you all so very much

quack

Great print quality on any paper, even sandpaper (up to 300 grit) … Quick printing at up to 9 pages per millisecond in black and 7 pages per hour in color

This is hardly a new sentiment, but as far as I’m concerned, Clear Channel can go fuck itself.

I was not able to install a new OS this weekend; mcgees.org stayed up, but that means it will be down some time later this week.

This weekend, mcgees.org and the other sites hosted by this machine will be out for extensive periods of time as I install a new operating system. I’ll post at the discussion page on the status.

Calpis concentrate.  Grey Goose.  Water.  Ice.  Combine at will.  Drink.  Yum.

If you want some fun and have Perl installed, download my Perl script fuck_with_the_scammers.pl and run it. Some “phishers” sent me a fake PayPal message soliciting my email, PayPal password, credit card number, expiration date, CCV, and (get this) PIN number. Hard to believe anyone would be stupid enough to fall for it. Anyway, run this on your system and you’ll give them 1000 randomly-generated entries to sort through. It would be really useful if we could distribute this across multiple IPs. You’ll need my bigwordlist.txt as well, but that’s fun to have anyway.

Pop quiz: Who’s this? (Nudity)

No, it’s not.  It’s this girl. (Semi nudity)

Another shot from the same shoot to strengthen the case. (Nudity)

But good grief, it’s convincing, isn’t it?  There’s an entire possible career open for this “Emmie”.

At least Fahrenheit 911 has a reference to a very interesting movie…hope Moore did something as good as the original Fahrenheit 451 which I recommend, excellent movie. — elpapacito

Let’s just remember that Fahrenheit 451 was a book before a movie, k? — agregoli

And before that, it was a temperature. — soyjoy

Don Hewitt, of whom I’m no great fan, is retiring from 60 Minutes, of which I’m also no great fan.  I heard him on NPR yesterday talking in a highly opinionated fashion about the propensity of Americans to change the channel repeatedly and essentially “walk out” of the program; he compared the remote to “a gun”. He posed the following question: how many feature films have you walked out of in the theater? He claimed that no one would be able to name five. This is supposed to prove that we have “nothing invested” in television programs, compared to movies.

Well, I’ve walked out of four films, and I’ve fallen asleep in three others (post-childhood.) I’m also a third his age. Extrapolate at will. I have a feeling others have comparable statistics. So, if you’re inclined, post at the board.

OK, if you’re curious: I walked out of:

1. Trespass (1992, 5.9 stars at IMDB),
2. Hard Target (1993, 5.3 stars,  stars),
3. Natural Born Killers (1994, 6.6 stars), and
4. Starship Troopers (1997, 6.6 stars)

I fell asleep during:

1. The Ghost and the Darkness (1996, 6.4 stars),
2. The Core (2003, 5.5 stars), and
3. Cavale, aka On The Run, aka Trilogy:One (2002, 6.8 stars)

I had another nice microharvest today: four daikon radishes. Pictures will follow. The largest was over 30 cm long, and had a circumference larger than my wrist! I know they can get to almost 50 kg, but this is still much larger than I had expected for my little garden patch. From the four daikon I composted more than 2 kilos of foliage! The plants were massive, and I realized I planted them much to closely, as the greens splay out in all directions.

As soon as I have a harvest, I start looking for people to give it to. I enjoy eating it, but love the look on recipients’ faces even more when I hand them home-grown produce. I gave three of the four away; I’ll keep one for misoshiru. I need to pick up some bonito to make dashi. I’m trying to decide which of my misos to use (store-bought, I don’t make my own.) My stomach’s rumbling.

Quote 1: We [at Macallan] started back in … 1996 with an 1874 bottle which was, at the time, the oldest bottle of Macallan we’d been able to track down. We’d bought it at auction … [and I] thought wouldn’t it be a great fun to be able to taste a whisky that had been made all those years ago. So we opened it and were amazed to find that it was similar — not identical — but similar to some casks we come across today. — David Robertson, Macallan distillery

Quote 2: The Scotsman has learned that far from being some of the oldest whisky in the world, the liquid inside the bottles [at Macallan's whisky museum] is not Victorian at all but dates from the late 1980s.… After a year-long investigation by the Macallan board, during which sample bottles were sent to Oxford University for … testing, it emerged that the liquid content inside the bottles is “modern”, in some cases as young as ten years old. — William Lyons, The Scotsman newspaper

Hmmm.  Maybe we shouldn’t be entirely amazed that the “ancient” Macallans taste so modern.  (This is just speculation. There is no hard evidence as of yet that the particular 19th century Macs used as templates for the replicas series were fakes. And in any case, no one I know of is accusing Macallan of intentionally perpetrating a hoax — seems like they were scammed just like everyone else.)

I had my first non-radish harvest from the garden today!  Here it is:

And the same thing, in the kitchen:

I just ate the baby carrot. But I stir-fried the greens in olive oil, with fresh lemon juice and garlic, black pepper, and a dash of cayenne, and served them sprinkled with some fleur de sel:

I boiled the beetroots in salted water and ate them:

I had them with a glass of inexpensive white Cotes-du-Rhône.

I’m working on a gardening page, and with any luck will have in running in a few days.