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.

The Noble Pug

 
Lightning

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.

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.

Read more

Leadership Questions

 
Fearless leader

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.

— Jasmyne Cannick, board member of the National Black Justice Coalition, quoted on PlanetOut.com

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.

— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Doggie Love

 
Barking dog in doghouse

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!

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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.”