The news story from Davidson County is one of those "stupid criminal" stories we get fairly regularly; a woman tried to pay her bail with counterfeit money. Here's the part that gives it that distinct North Carolina flair: she was arrested at her home on Nascar Fan Alley.
One of the oldest's Christmas presents this year was one year of Xbox Live for his Xbox 360. What we didn't realize when we bought the service and a wireless controller to make playing MMPGs super-easy is that the XBox 360 requires a special wireless network adapter to be able to connect to our home network. The bastards at Microsoft couldn't be bothered to design a connection that would allow a "generic" network adapter to work, and because I've been able to hook up all nature of things to our network, like say our Tivo, with standard network adapters it never occurred to me that we'd have to buy a special one for the Xbox 360. And what does one of Microsoft's little gizmos cost? Oh, a cool $99.
Luckily we have two alternatives. One is to hook the Xbox 360 directly to the router with an ethernet cable, but since our router is in my office on the second floor and the Xbox is hooked to the TV in our den in the basement that would have to be one very long cable. Our other option is to use a powerline adapter which is the way I plan to go. I've already set up a powerline kit to connect Celeste's computer to the network so I only need to get one more adapter to hook up the boy's XBox 360 which should save us at least $50, not to mention the little bit of satisfaction I'll be getting from not letting Microsoft screw me yet again. I figure 20 years of this abuse is enough.
Want to know how Michael Vick burned through his fortune? The Smoking Gun has the story and below are the highlights (click on the images to enlarge).
One contributing factor to newspapers' current problems might be that some of their management might not be too bright. A former Raleigh N&O writer blogs about a memo sent out by one of the editors at the paper with his/her evaluation of that day's issue:
A few comments on some good work in today’s paper:
–A lively front page that gave our readers plenty to talk about.
Has the political right truly turned the corner and will cease to demonize opponents on so-called moral issues, or are we witnessing the boldest, most cynical, most hypocritical political spin in modern history? What is one to make of John McCain’s greeting at the Twin Cities airport yesterday of America’s most famous baby mama with a warm hug, and the apparent attaboy pat on the shoulder for the self-described “f***ing redneck” baby daddy? Are we now celebrating teenagers’ raging hormones?
The claims department feature (see 8a) is a great reader service. I would like to see more scrutiny of the “facts” in Sarah Palin’s speech last night.Now to our local politicians….Is Kenn Gardner just an inept liar or a man so greedy that he doesn’t care whether we think he’s an inept liar as long as he gets paid?
–A newsy and entertaining Triangle&Co. front.
I’d bet that Barry Saunders is hearing a lot of amens this morning as well as feeling a lot of hate. Good. A columnist should stir ‘em up. Much of America may have forgotten, but the black community has a very long memory of Republicans demonizing black unwed moms. The black wire–radio and a growing black blogesphere–is crackling this morning with wicked “Juno” jokes. In general, black bloggers (wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com. A warning to the easily offended, the name is a big clue) are having a great time with the GOP show in Minneapolis.–Lots of interesting people stories in the sports section about college athletes and the pros. For those following tennis’ sibling rivalry, Serena has gained a slight lead by beating older sister Venus in the U.S. Open quarterfinals.
–Good, timely story–and an inviting headline (Life over breasts)– on the Life, etc. cover.
Given that the cardinal sin that newspapers and other news outlets are accused of committing is "bias" you would think that a manager at a prominent news outlet would avoid putting his/her biases in writing. Everyone has biases, but when you're in a business that lives off of its reputation for objectivity, well you just might want to keep those biases to yourself. If you put it in writing it will find its way to someone you don't want to see it. We've had email and the web for, oh, 15 years or more and to think that someone in the media wouldn't realize this would go public is just too dense for words.
More fun on the education front. In a school district in New Jersey 29 students have been given two days of detention for paying for their $2 lunches in pennies. Apparently it started out as a prank, but then turned into a protest over shortened lunch periods. The school superintendent says that the students were disciplined "for holding up their peers and disrespecting lunch aides."
What I love is that the "educators", who must see every problem as a nail that must be hammered, couldn't come up with a solution that would counteract the protest. The evidence that the "educators" were outsmarted by the eighth graders is the fact that the local media picked up the story.
What could the "educators" have done to avoid this little PR fiasco? Maybe take the pennies, put them in a cup labeled with that students name and then count them after the lunch period is over. If the student's payment is short then he or she can be billed for it later. That way the students' peers aren't held up and their protest will peter out fairly quickly once they realize how hard it is to gather 200 pennies on a daily basis and then tote them to school.
Hey I'll be the first to say that eight graders can be a royal pain in the a-- to deal with, and sometimes I think that middle school teachers should get combat pay, but to be so stupid as this I think the "educators" involved here are getting what's coming to them.
I used to play in a lot of basement poker games when I lived in DC. In fact I played in some basement tournaments that paid out very handsomely to the top two or three finishers, and as far as I know the tournaments were legal because the host kept nothing. In fact the only game that might have been illegal was one hosted by a guy that asked everyone to ante up a couple of bucks for food and if you charge for anything like that you're technically running an illegal game.
Luckily for me I never found out if the basement games were legal or not because none of them were ever raided. Some poor schlubs in California weren't so lucky as evidenced by this first person account of a raid by the San Mateo Sheriff's department on what sounds like some pretty low-stakes poker players.
Back in 05 there was a raid at Ham's Restaurant over in Greensboro that maybe is a little more understandable since it was held in a public place and the prize was pretty significant ($10,000 seat in a poker tournament). Not saying I think it should have been raided since everyone involved seemed to think they were running a legal game akin to a Bingo Night, but still it's a little easier to swallow than raiding some suburban low-stakes basement game. Unless someone's making serious money or scamming the players I just don't see how busting these friendly games is a good use of law enforcement resources.
Speaking of good basement poker does anyone know a nice friendly poker game in the Winston-Salem area? I promise I won't breath a word about it, and as my friends in VA will tell you I'm usually very popular with the other players. In other words I suck.
I think most businesses would love to have a little word of mouth advertising, but it seems that the folks at Ford (or at least their law firm) are more interested in protecting their trademark than cultivating a relationship with some of their most avid supporters. From Boing Boing:
Josh sez, "The folks at BMC (Black Mustang Club) automotive forum wanted to put together a calendar featuring members' cars, and print it through CafePress. Photos were submitted, the layout was set, and... CafePress notifies the site admin that pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can't be reproduced without permission. So even though Ford has a lineup of enthusiasts who want to show off their Ford cars, the company is bent on alienating them...
"I got some more info from the folks at cafepress and according to them, a law firm representing Ford contacted them saying that our calendar pics (and our club's event logos - anything with one of our cars in it) infringes on Ford's trademarks which include the use of images of THEIR vehicles. Also, Ford claims that all the images, logos and designs OUR graphics team made for the BMC events using Danni are theirs as well. Funny, I thought Danni's title had my name on it ... and I thought you guys owned your cars ... and, well ... I'm not even going to get into how wrong and unfair I feel this whole thing is as I'd be typing for hours, but I wholeheartedly echo everything you guys have been saying all afternoon. I'm not letting this go un-addressed and I'll keep you guys posted as I get to work on this.
I'm sorry, but at this point we will not be producing the 2008 BMC Calendar, featuring our 2007 Members of the Month, solely due to Ford Motor Company's claim that THEY own all rights to the photos YOU take of YOUR car."
You can read the predictably irate comments of club members on the BMCForum here.
Cross posted at Lowder Enterprises.
From Boing Boing comes the tale of a guy who allegedly steals some computers and inadvertently posts pictures of himself on flickr for the world to see. From the post:
"Last week a number of computers were stolen from our office in Vancouver, BC. One of those computers was a shared iMac with Flickrbooth, an app that automatically uploads photo booth shots to our flickr account, installed on it. Just this morning a friend called to tell us that there are photos of whoever has the computer now in our flickr stream! Obviously the guy didn't know he was uploading images of himself and his awesome tattoos."
Here's a link to the shots on the company's flickr account. Do you know who this guy is? The theft victims and the Vancouver police would love to hear about it. Looks like the SomethingAwful forums are all over the case, too.
Update: A gem in the comments thread: "There should be a word for this, thinking you're getting away with something on the sly while the world laughs at you, anticipating your inevitable demise -- schadendouche?" [beatnik]
To help us understand this exquisite new term (schadendouche) let's explore its roots.
First we have schadenfreude: a German word meaning 'pleasure taken from someone else's misfortune'.
Then we have douche: Douche bag, or simply douche, are considered pejorative terms in Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. The slang usage of the term dates back to the 1960s.[4] The term may be used in a phrase such as "that guy is such a douche bag!"
Yes, I think we have a winner and I also imagine that we've all had our moments of schadendouche-ism...or would it be schadendouche-ity?
A couple of guys in Massachusetts are selling bulletproof backpacks at $175 each. As one commenter pointed out on this blog post about the backpacks most kids carry so many books in their backpacks a regular backpack is going to be bulletproof already. What's next, suits of armor as school uniforms?
I'm not going to mince words: I think that if this letter to the editor in the Winston-Salem Journal from Robert L. Hutchens, Pastor of Meadowview Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, is any indication of his intellect then he's about as poor a leader of a flock as you're going to find. His letter is written, I think, to support the Forsyth County Commissioners' decision to fight the ACLU's effort to stop the practice of sectarian prayers before commission meetings. Here's what he wrote:
While militant Muslims attempt to overthrow world governments with violence, some local governments continue to claim that we can’t pray in Jesus’ name in government meetings. This controversy separates those who are Christian in name only from Christ’s true disciples who obey God before men.
The Danbury Baptists wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who assured them that government would stay out of churches’ business because of separation of church and state. It’s meant to keep government out of the church, not vice-versa. That same week Thomas Jefferson attended Christian worship in the Capitol, and at his request, military service bands played Christian hymns.
Atheists are free not to believe, and should thank the Baptists, for Baptists have always stood for soul liberty, whether choosing Christ or not. During the Middle Ages, apostate Roman Catholicism murdered millions of Anabaptists and atheists with power from a corrupt union of religion and government. During our nation’s infancy, European Protestants continued to persecute Baptists attempting to unionize church and state. Only those ignoring historical facts pervert this separation and attempt to limit our right to Biblical prayer before government meetings.
Thankfully some other readers of the Journal didn't hesitate to call him on his, uh, creative historical perspective. On August 4, Rudy Diamond of Lewisville wrote to the Journal:
A letter to the editor (“In Jesus’ Name,” July 28) says that Thomas Jefferson’s wall-of-separation letter to the Danbury Baptists is “meant to keep government out of the church, not vice versa.” I beg to differ. Nothing in Jefferson’s writings supports a one-way wall of separation of church and state.
Jefferson distrusted the clergy. In a letter to Jeremiah Moor in 1800, Jefferson wrote, “The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”
Not only did Jefferson distrust the clergy, but his view of Christianity also differed from the views held by today’s religious right. In an April 11, 1823, letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote, “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
An accurate reading of history will fully support the concept of a separation of church and state that is not just one way.
RUDY DIAMOND
Lewisville
And on August 5 Mel Henderson wrote a letter to the editor in response to Pastor Hutchens:
The writer of the letter “In Jesus’ Name” (July 28) claims that when Thomas Jefferson wrote of the wall of separation between church and state, he only meant it to be a one-way wall, preventing the state from influencing the church.
Jefferson was a brilliant man, and I think he knew full well the difference between a wall and a funnel. His letter to the Danbury Baptists is quite clear.
This “one-way wall” is not only a science-fiction device; it is an attempt to make something say the opposite of what it says.
The whole point of this minister’s letter seems to be “we Baptists will humor you separatists and let you have your religious liberty — even though you have no right to it.” As American citizens, we do.
MEL H. HENDERSON
I owe Rudy and Mel a debt of gratitude because their responses prevented me from getting my panties in a bunch and did a much better job of putting the disingenuous Pastor Hutchens in his place.
