Dirty mind?

Perhaps I'm a bit of a dirty-minded fool, but intel's ad-strategy of "Entertainment in your lap" could perhaps use some word-smithing.

UN Debates Meaning of 'Wipe'

I couldn't have said it better myself:

UN Debates Meaning of 'Wipe' Israel
by Mapby Scott Ott

(2005-10-27) -- The United Nations Security Council today took up discussion on what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might have meant when he called for Israel to be "wiped out from the map". Secretary General Kofi Annan said Iran, as a member of the U.N., must be given the benefit of the doubt that the phrase was intended to encourage peaceful diplomacy. "'Wiped' is a word that can denote cleanliness," said Mr. Annan. "The Iranian president may have simply meant that the map should be cleaned so Israel's legitmate borders are easier to see."

Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks came during the month-long 'World without Zionism' celebration, and echoed the Ayatollah Khomeini's previous comments about map hygiene. In related news, the U.S. House today begins debate on creation of a month-long holiday called 'World Without Islamofascism,' President George Bush said he looks forward to celebrating the new holiday with a ceremonial "wiping of the map."

Harriet Miers gone!

I heard the good news on the radio while driving in to work this morning. Maybe this'll clue the President in to the fact that he actually has to pay attention to his constituents? May we hope?

found it

Over at Boxing Alcibiades, Russ has a photo of the Hamster Poster from Michael Yon's excellent blog. Here's the original (right-click to save).

Unicef's new campaign

I don't know much about Unicef, but if bombing the smurfs (w/ permission) is what it takes to get the point across about Darfur and other such malignancies, more power to them!

Intelligent Design Considered Harmful

Here's a disturbing article in which a science-writer finds himself disturbed by the the Christian Fundamentalists' latest chimera, Intelligent Design, which y'all know by now just drives me utterly batty.

I agree with his basic thesis -- so called "Intelligent Design" is an assault not only upon Biology, but upon science itself. It took Sputnik to scare our native theocrats back into their caves; what will it take next time?

Once upon a time (back when I was a seminarian trying to explain what the hell I was doing with my life), I used to explain to people that matters of faith are not beliefs. Beliefs may be contradicted, whereas matters of faith are "more true" than facts. Sadly, I'm now terrified that I may in fact have been more correct about this than I'd realized. We've all seen the mathematical proof that 1 equals 2, and the division by zero that underpins it. Is religious faith similarly dangerous? How can we convince people that religion belongs in the sphere of morality, not the sphere of facts, before they turn us into a psuedo-Christian version of Iran? Or worse, before the socialist utopianists convince us that all morality is wrong because it leads to fundamentalism?

Ipod squee

Maddie got me an IPod for my birthday and I spent the weekend loading up all the music at home that drives her nuts (she doesn't do metal, or industrial, or anything with significant dissonance). This was cool enough.

But today I rode my bike to work.... Motorcycles are definitely enhanced with KMFDM.

Beware Yahoo Spyware

I was installing stuff onto my new machine this weekend (replacing Black, my venerable old black Dell notebook -- the new one is Grey, a shiny new Alienware beast that hopefully'll last me at least as long as Black did), and suddenly I found my Internet Explorer had a Yahoo toolbar. Since all I'd done was to check mail, that means that Yahoo ran a script on my machine to install this software against my will, and is probably doing the same to other folks's computers. I'm outraged, personally, although Yahoo probably doesn't give a crap about that, even if I do pay them money for their service.

If your browser suddenly gets a Yahoo toolbar, before they can do anything nefarious with it, go to the control panel, to "install/update/remove software" and scroll down to the bottom of the list. You can get rid of it with a click of the mouse. I can't promise it'll stay gone, though. And people wonder why Google is so successful when most of the industry is run by crooks!