I was pondering the other day why Christmas is the only holiday I can think of that gets a ‘Merry’ as opposed to a ‘Happy’. ‘Merry’ everything else just sounds stupid but it’s still interesting to me that it worked out that way. I mean, even New Year’s which is like a brother to Christmas only gets a ‘Happy’. I suspect it has something to do with the Victorians but I’m just guessing.

At any rate, have a Happy Easter. Enjoy the appearance of the the big albino bunny with the brightly colored plastic eggs filled with chocolate that somehow represents the resurrection of the Son of God.

I used to be powerfully attracted to Juliette Lewis. Probably because she always plays psychos and there appears to be something in my genetic makeup that attracts them to me. Anyway. Now she’s older. And a raging Scientologist. She still looks like she might be pretty cool though. And she’s a rocker. Here she is this week. You decide.

I don’t know about the suspenders.

I was talking to a guy the other day and he was bitching about the price of gas going up again so I suggested that if we really wanted to do something about it we could take the Brazilian path and make it economically attractive to run vehicles on biofuels that are from the US. He freaked on me and started talking about how that wasn’t possible and that was partly the reason food was so expensive. I’ve never been sure if those kind of people are neocons who want to keep their Big Oil cronies rolling in cash or liberals that aren’t very smart. I’ve heard Rush Limbaugh say the same sort of stupid crap (I’ll set aside for a moment that I lost any respect for him I may have had when he got caught with illegal prescriptions after saying anybody who used illegal drugs should go to prison. I agree, he should be in prison). Here’s the thing…. I’ve been all over and there is a lot of open space in the US that’s suitable for growing sugar cane or sugar beets or soybeans or any of the dozens of other plants suitable for use in biofuels.

My conspiracy theory craziness thinks it has a lot to do with Big Oil not wanting the competition and Big Government (and I include both the reds and the blues in that category) being terrified that they won’t be able to tax biofuels. Biodiesel and ethanol can both be brewed up relatively easy in your backyard. For Big Oil this means that they can’t manipulate the price of oil. I know, I know, they say they don’t already. It’s all “speculators” fault. But have you ever noticed that when the price gets really high and people start talking about windfall profits taxes the price drops for a few months until something new comes along — like say thieves at AIG raping the US Treasury– then they inch their way back up? For Big Government it means you lose the ability to tax fuels. How do you tax a gallon of something when you don’t have any idea how many gallons of it are being used?

Bad for Big Everybody. Of course it would also mean that we wouldn’t have to care what the Middle East was doing and they could go back to being camel jockeys.

I went down to the Nextcare Urgent Care place on Kildaire Farm Rd in Cary to get a physical last Friday. I walked in and told the receptionist what I needed and she said there was only one provider and it would be a while. I asked her if tomorrow (Saturday) would be better and she said she didn’t know then went on to say that it was packed from the minute she opened the door. I’ve been there before and she’s one of the most hateful bitches I’ve ever had to deal with. Why do businesses let people who don’t like people work in positions where all they have to do is work with people all day. Apparently there is a shortage of jobs that don’t require human interaction. To be fair, the woman that took over for her a little later was really nice. She came out and asked how people were doing and let me know that it would only be a few minutes before they were ready for me.

At any rate, it was 45 minutes before I got in for a routine physical. It boggles they mind.

Today is the 40th birthday of the RFC. My guess is that maybe two people reading this will have any idea what an RFC is but everybody needs them. They’re what amounts to the governing documents of the Internet. When I was an ubergeek I used to read them in my spare time. Now not so much.

Here’s the section of RFC1630 that talks about how a web address should look:

The HTTP protocol specifies that the path is handled transparently by those who handle URLs, except for the servers which de-reference them. The path is passed by the client to the server with any request, but is not otherwise understood by the client. The host details are not passed on to the client when the URL is an HTTP URL which refers to the server in question. In this case the string sent starts with the slash which follows the host details. However, when an HTTP server is being used as a gateway (or proxy”) then the entire URI, whether HTTP or some other scheme, is passed on the HTTP command line. The search part, if present, is sent as part of the HTTP command, and may in this respect be treated as part of the path. No fragmentid part of a WWW URI (the hash sign and following) is sent with the request. Spaces and control characters in URLs must be escaped for transmission in HTTP, as must other disallowed characters.

It goes on for a while after this but you get the idea. Excellent conversation starter at the bar on Friday night especially with really hot blondes.

Maybe I’m reading this wrong but I think the article in the NY Times essentially says that the AP is hitching their wagon to newspapers and they’re going to limit Google and other aggregators from using news wire reports. If I were Google, my response would be to stop returning results for AP stories at all. Been nice knowing you AP.

Here’s an article at Gawker that explains it probably better than me. And Danny Sullivan issued a rant today that is waaaaay more insightful than anything I could have come up with. I particularly like the

User agent: *

Disallow: /

Funny. And true. You’ll never see WSJ give up traffic from Google. They just want it to be one way. And that’s why they’ll die.

One of the things you have to love about the Internet is that it gets the word out about government abuse of power. And with our recent penchant for ‘Wars on Shit’ like the War on Drugs and the War on Terror that happens a lot. Here’s a recording of the TSA abusing a citizen for, get this, carrying $4,700 in cash. Forty seven hundred dollars isn’t even a down payment on a car. I’ve looked over the list of prohibited items at the TSA website very carefully and don’t see anything there that says anything about cash in any amount. They’re own website also says:

Since 2001, we have been mandated by law to appropriately screen air travelers to ensure that certain items and persons prohibited from flying don’t board commercial airliners.

It doesn’t say anything about enforcing criminal statutes which is what the thugs in this recording seem to think they’re supposed to be doing.  Even if they were, I’m pretty sure the cut-off for reporting cash transactions to the government (part of the War on Drugs) is $10,000.  Cops are scary enough. High school dropouts without any law enforcement training are worse.

Is it just me or does anybody else remember when the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire because they had to produce papers on demand and their government repressed its citizens?

World Pillow Fight Day was held on April 4th. Except in Detroit. Because the police wouldn’t let people engage in a pillow fight without a permit. So let me see if I understand the situation. There are no jobs. The weather sucks. Their professional sports teams all suck (except maybe the Red Wings… since I’m a Southerner I don’t know shit about hockey). The economy sucks. The housing market sucks. And you need a fucking permit to have a pillow fight? I can’t imagine why everybody is leaving. The good news is that once everybody is gone all of you authority types won’t have to worry about people engaging in fun activities to take their minds off the generally bleak conditions of their city. And cleanup won’t be an issue either.

I guess that’s a good call. For the record, this is how the cops in Raleigh handled it. Maybe that’s why everybody from Detroit is here.

Back in January, I posted about the death of old media and posited that the order of their death would be newspapers, tv, then radio because there wasn’t a mobile equivalent to radio for your car. In 4 months, technology has proven me wrong. In the last week or so a client has appeared for Pandora and Slacker for my Blackberry. After using both for a little while, I can safely say that radio is doomed too. If you’re familiar with my opinion of Clear Channel and the other fucktards in charge of radio these days then you’ll already know that the day can’t come fast enough as far as I’m concerned.

Why the hell would you listen to stuff programmed by somebody else when you can set up exactly the stuff you want to listen to? Especially when it recommends things based on your likes. There you go.

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of people have trouble with the words ‘sell’ and ‘sale’. Maybe it’s a Southern thing, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. (Clearly based on the photo from Manchester, England it’s not. You learn something new every day.)  My theory (which is mine) is that with a Southern accent they sound really similar. I know it’s not a spelling issue because you never see ‘sail’ used in the wrong place. I saw a sign the other day that said ‘We sale garages’ when combined with all the ‘For Sell’ sign I see I can only conclude there’s a problem. In an effort to make life a little better, I’m going to straighten things out.

Sell is something you do. Sale is something that is. You can sell sombody a paperback at the book sale. You can’t sale a book at the book sell.

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