Alton Brown hosts a loverly show on the Food Network called Good Eats. Good Eats has a season pass on my TiVo, and it's #4 if I'm recalling correctly. It's a fun, silly, educational show. Slashdot periodically collects questions from their passel of nitwits and sends them off to famous people for an e-mail interview. Alton Brown answers his questions, finally.

Proof positive that Tony Blair was wrong!!! Look! Proof! Not just evidence, but actual proof with numbers and everything!

Douglas Adams have a speech at Digital Biota 2 about God and atheism. A transcript has appeared. (Found via a comment to IMAO)

I didn't see Senator Wellstone's speech, but Lileks did. One excerpt:

For that matter - haven’t you noticed that we already have a coalition? Turkey. Kuwait. Bahrain. Qatar. Britain. These are places that are risking attack to help the invasion. A “coalition” isn't more valid if it includes countries that have nothing to do with the battle and would be privately pleased if we lose.

The whole thing about "red states" and "blue states" was just a metaphor, not a commandment. Dork.

BWA-hahahahahaha! Think of the Children(tm)! Hee hee hee!

Words fail me. Man plans to marry woman who ripped off one of his testicles. (Found via WorldWideRant)

Just a reminder: the truly heinous CDBTPA isn't dead yet. In an ongoing effort to point out how pervasive and stupid this law really is, Ed Felten continues to amass a list of things that will be regulated under this horrid bill. Write your Congressperson now, using pen and paper, and tell him/her how bad an idea you think this is. If you don't want to do that, at least email them.

If you're going to email, keep this in mind: the Congressperson doesn't read your email. They don't want to read forty-seven pages of single-spaced text laying out your argument with twelve pages of footnotes attached. A staffer will read your email, and add another tick to the "for" or "against" column on some worksheet somewhere which will eventually be summarized for the Congressperson. So ... write your email with no profanity, and probably just one sentence like "I'm vehemently opposed to the passage of the Hollings' CBDTPA bill."

Ummmm ... does anybody besides me think this is either in poor taste, or just extremely surreal? (Found via Little Green Footballs)

Kelly, who appears to be a production assistant from Firefly, has her own blog about the show. (found via Sgt. Stryker). If you aren't already watching Firefly, then hurry and TiVo up an episode. Science fiction westerns may not be everybody's cup of tea, but I really like the show so far. Have some.

The secret is out! The true intellectual brilliance in the White House is stored in the brains of Condoleeza Rice. She wrote the document undergirding our foreign policy. How long before she gets to be President in her own right?

Brian Doherty asks "what's the deal with the persecution of Martha Stewart?" I admit I had completely ignored this entire story out of blatant disinterest, and only read this because it appeared in Reason Online.

Iraq and U.N. agree to inspections. I'm shocked, shocked, shocked to discover that when the Iraqis said unconditional they didn't really mean "unconditional".

I've read this twice now, and do not detect any signs of cheek/tongue insertion: Buying Iraq - A possibly surreal invasion

Lileks weighs in on lots of stuff, including this gem about Senator Toricelli:

I detect the emanation of the afterglow of a shadow of a penumbra here. Look at the first sentence: they’re “likely to argue” that it’s too late to put another name on the ballot. The law says you can’t withdraw after 51 days. Period. So they’re “likely to argue” that there’s a law that governs this situation, and it ought to apply. The Times seems to imply that the law is merely an opinion, an idea who’s competing in a truth pageant and possibly padding its bra.

And this one too:

After all, Toricelli didn’t quit because he discovered an eight-pound neoplasm in his small intestine, or had his brain turned into a fine red mist when a marble-sized meteorite from the Oort cloud struck him in a 7-11 parking lot. He’s not even under indictment. He resigned because there was such a bad odor coming from him and his campaign that actual wavy cartoon stink lines were coming off him, and the cameras were starting to pick it up.

Now go read the damned thing before I wind up quoting all of it.

Just in time, the illustrious Megan McArdle explains why nuclear deterrence won't work with Iraq. Left unstated is her conclusion, so I will supply one: "Therefore, we must not allow Iraq to acquire nuclear weapons for our own national self-interest."

Oof. Oww. I got it; stop thwacking me. Godless Capitalist takes on "realist" political scientist theory, and ends up with a catalog of why we should take out Iraq. Woo-hoo!

It's entirely pictorial, and you probably should not view when in a weepy and/or vindictive mood: John Bono fact-checks Gitmo's inhumane conditions. For the two people still living under rocks, Guantanamo Bay is where the combatants captured during the pacification of the Taliban are being held.

A U.S.S.Clueless reader, Matt Cline, sent a long-ish email describing how people could believe in "root causes" without appeal to any spritual (i.e. non-material) aspects. It goes quite a ways to explain lots of what I characterize as irrational lefty behavior through the exposition of the Mean Green Meme.

From the I-shit-you-not-dot-com department, there is an actual name for women who decide they aren't lesbians any more: hasbians. Once again: not a joke.

Okay, I lied. One more post about app servers. Pramati Technologies is marketing an application server, Sun-certified with the little Java logo and everything, targeted at small and medium businesses plus ISVs. The nice bit, from my point of view, is that they sell a plethora of packages that may be embedded or bundled with your product and distributed to your customers. Plus the price is much more in line with what a small startup can afford to float until the invoices get paid.

Yes, I know all about JBoss and Orion. Sometimes, even I want support from somebody besides me and the mouse in my pocket.

I'll be evaluating this too, and will post my invective later.

I have seen the future ... and it's all grainy, but well-labeled.

I promise, I'll be done posting crap about J2EE application servers soon. It would have been easier, I think, to just sit in my Tomcat cocoon and never have peeked outside. Sigh. In any case, eWEEK has a horrible logo, and an article about BEA and IBM slugging it out for the appserver crown. The curious bit is here:

WebSphere edges WebLogic on many performance tests, such as ECperf, indicating there's at least some product involved. Both are schooled by Oracle, which takes performance seriously when it wants to be taken seriously.

I don't know if it's still true, but Orion was at one time licensed by Oracle and re-badged as "Oracle 9i Application Server".

For a whole host of reasons, I'm really delighted to find The Open Web Application Security Project, a group of people trying to build a catalog of "best practices" and technologies (if you'll forgive me a buzzword cluster) for securing web applications. I just found this today, so it will take a while to digest it all.

Look! More twee quizzes!



What Obscure Animal are you?