Time passes. Listen. Time passes. . . .
Happy Birthday, Spam
On this date in 1994, a message was posted to some Usenet newsgroups by the law firm of Canter and Siegel, advertising its services for the Green Card lottery.
Others soon followed in the footsteps of Canter and Siegel, torpedoing the usefulness of newsgroups with junk messages, which eventually spread from Usenet to email.
According to Brightmail, most email is now spam.
Come On!
The Noble Pug
The pug is among the oldest breeds of dog. It is believed to have originated in China before 400 B.C., and is known to have been a pet in Buddhist monasteries in Tibet.
The pug made the long trek to Europe with 17th-century traders of the Dutch East India Company.
I bet they had their heads out the window the whole way!
Famous pug owners include the Empress Josephine, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
We Need to Know the Truth
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, said he thought there ought to be some investigation of the claim that Aristide was forced out and escorted by U.S. troops.
‘I have a very close friend in Massachusetts who talked directly to people who have made that allegation,’ Kerry said on Today on NBC. ‘I don’t know the truth of it. I really don’t. But I think it needs to be explored and we need to know the truth of what happened.’
This has become standard operating procedure for Democrats: put out some outlandish statement (President Bush had foreknowledge of Sept. 11, Bush was a ‘deserter’), then say you ‘don’t know the truth of it’ but it’s ‘out there’ and ‘we need to know’ what happened.
Stop the Presses
Black Voters Align With Democrats Against Bush
French Marines
From a Wall Street Journal article on the arrival of French troops in Haiti:
U.S. Marines set up a security perimeter at the airport, kneeling in the grass as about 80 French Marines arrived in C-160 transport planes. The French Marines’ supplies included crates of bottled Evian water.
Separated at Birth
A Riddle
Q: What do a 10-year-old boy and a 4-month-old dog have in common?
A: When you ask them to do something they don’t want to do, they just look at you like they’re unable to understand human language . . .
Phraseology
“Pride goeth before a fall,” my son says, as he stuffs a slice of pizza into his mouth.
“Really?” I ask. “What does that mean?”
Issue of the Day
People my age or a little younger may remember some years ago, when the issue of burning the American flag suddenly became the most important issue in the country.
People were so riled up about it that a constitutional amendment was proposed to make flag burning illegal.
Rainy Day Women
It’s been pouring rain in Southern California last night and this morning . . .
Why does every local TV news show have to send some poor female reporter out to do live remotes, to stand in the biggest deluge they can find and tell people something they already know?
Leadership Questions
Do you find that when one person is appointed Leader, other people in the group then expect the Leader to do things that they could do perfectly well for themselves?
That they expect the leader to function as a sort of surrogate parent or playground monitor?
If you are the Leader, what, if anything, do you do to encourage or discourage this?
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Mass Confusion
The biggest problem I find is that many black people don’t support the gay and lesbian civil rights movement because they don’t see black people as gay. And I think a lot of that comes from what they see on television because there are one or two characters who are both black and gay.
Now that’s the looniest statement I’ve heard today — although I do think the number of people unable to distinguish television from real life has been trending sharply upward . . .
A Lot of My Problems
I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems.
I’m in the Mood for Soup
I’m looking at the 5-day forecast for Irvine: little rain cloud icons for Wed, Th and Fri.
Rain always puts me in the mood for piping hot chicken noodle soup. Makes me feel like a kid again!
Although I usually get the chicken noodle from Trader Joe’s now, not the old-fashioned Campbell’s Soup . . .
Love and Marriage
Love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage.
Ha Ha Ha! What a joke!
To young people, gay people, young gay people, I would say this:
Don’t confuse “I love you” with “I want to marry you.”
Adventures in Housebreaking
Doggie Love
My wife was talking to a fellow dog-walker at the park this morning. The woman asked her, among other things, does she work, and my wife said no.
That was good, the woman replied, because it really raises her hackles when people buy a dog and then leave it alone all day while they’re at work.
What an astounding statement!
Genius or Geek?
I was explaining to my boy how to generate a web page from a database, so I can display it different ways, add new stuff, and not have to rewrite the HTML . . .
“I can see why you’re excited about that,” he said, “but I can’t really get excited about it myself because I’m not a computer gee—genius.”
“Did you just say ‘computer geek’?”
“Almost.”