Are my eyes really blue?

* Family's always trying, isn't it?

* In high school, when I was first coming to consciousness of sports, my fellows and I all supported the Detroit Pistons. Not only did we see ourselves as the academic-bowl version of the Motor City Bad Boys, we were thrilled to see the Lakers-Celtics monopoly broken. I say that by way of saying that for this year's NBA finals, I am rooting for plague. Lots of it.

* I bought the oxblood DMs. The string on one of them broke almost immediately. I replaced it with a black lace out of my last East Coast pair of black 1460s, which I think is an appropriate passing of the torch and kinda punk besides. I doubt I will wear them that much - my black Solovairs are much easier to make work with my everyday wardrobe - but the important thing at this point is just to *have* them.

* Besides, you'll never know when I'll need to go back in time and pass as a pre-Two Tone skinhead. Along those lines, I now need a donkey jacket and a Lambretta. If you have either, please write in care of I Hate That Poser, Box L-7, Googleburg, CA.

* The new Fratellis single doesn't sound that much like Costello Music did, although I do appreciate the driving piano throughout. It reminds me of something but I can't put my finger on what.

* Who knew they were putting an IKEA factory in Danville VA?

* I finished second for the month in the online trivia competition I'm part of. That was almost entirely down to my missing two days - if you'd added two instances of my average score to the totals, I would have finished in first, handily. The moral of the story, as always, is that four-fifths of life consists of showing up for it.

• Vandy's non-con schedule this year: at Miami (OH), home to Rice and Duke, and away at Wake. Conference home games are Carolina, Auburn, Florida and UT. If Big Six is going to happen this year, it'll mean winning a few on the road - and of Ole Miss, Georgia, Mississippi State, and Kentucky, the best chance is that we somehow catch Georgia sleeping again. Not the sort of thing you want to hang your hopes on, especially given how many key Commodores just graduated. Still...only 89 days to go.

* My Buddy Vince Sez that if you're looking for a new HDTV, jump on those Father's Day sales in the next two weeks.

Finis.

Dead at age 79.

I saw Bo Diddley once, the first time I went to City Stages, in 1990. I think it was Friday night, and I remember seeing Charles Barkley in the crowd packed into the park outside City Hall. If memory serves me right, Bo Diddley only played four songs, each of which took about 15 minutes and was full of all sorts of improvs and riffs and freestyle action that put every other rocker at the festival to shame, capping the whole thing with a burst of "The Star Spangled Banner" that made Hendrix look like a sophomore in the garage. And Bo Diddley was in his sixties at the time and still churning out an unmistakeable sound.

It's not often that you and your dad were going to see the same artist at a similar age. The difference is, the old man was sneaking into Boutwell Auditorium for what was ostensibly a "race-only" show (i.e. decent white folks wouldn't be caught dead) and I was crammed in a public park among 50,000 people of all ages and colors. So I guess that's something.

The point is, Hillary Clinton has a couple of wins in decertified primaries. They mean a whole lot of nothing, because there won't be any delegates awarded, and Obama is still sitting on more live delegates in hand - but inasmuch as they contribute to the sense that she will be X, they are valuable wins. But they will only contribute to that sense *IF* the results are presented in that matter.

-January 29, 2008

I could be wrong, but I'm not.

Yes, delegates were actually awarded out of Florida and Michigan. In Florida they were apportioned according to the voting; in Michigan they were apportioned according to a deal cooked up by the Michigan Democratic Party which was subsequently endorsed by 2/3 of the DNC panel empowered to adjudicate the disposition of those delegates.

However, the net impact was, at most, a couple dozen delegates. Out of over 2000 needed to win. All the hue and cry over Michigan and Florida, at net, budged a hair over one percent of the totals. Ultimately, they do Hillary Clinton more harm than good, because back in January, everyone agreed that those were beauty contests rather than viable elections.

Now, with the brain trust of Wolfson and Davis and Penn and etc, they become the last link in a preposterous chain of events that says that if you count primary states only, assume no input from caucus states, count in Puerto Rico and other non-state entities, and assume that not one single person in Michigan would have voted for Obama, then you can almost show Team HRC with a larger popular vote count.

In our reality-based world, of course, you go for the nomination with the delegate-selection system you have, not the one you try to shat out halfway through the fifteenth round of the fight. Yes, caucuses were created to stimulate popular participation and build a base more inclined to activist participation, and superdelegates were created to counteract the influence of caucuses, and Iowa and New Hampshire get their special privileges because...because...shit, I got nothing. Nor does anyone else. At some point, the Dems will revert to a model like the GOPs, and the GOP will move closer to the Dem model to prevent what happened to them this year, and the lion will lie down with the porterhouse.

But until then, we have this, and Obama's leading it fair and square. And aside from close personal friends and a few delusionals, Team HRC knows it. Even James Carville, the Clinton's most loyal retainer, is talking about how Barack Obama "can and will" win in November.

Game over. Everything else is bookkeeping.

Fifty years ago, the old man was sneaking into a segregated Bo Diddley show.

Tonight, the Democratic Party - the party of Bilbo and Eastland and Ross Barnett, of Leander Perez and Lester Maddox, the party of George Fucking Wallace - chose a black man to lead the charge.

He didn't back into it, he didn't stumble into it, he didn't get the hookup - he had a plan, he stuck to it, he just kept grinding, and tonight, he's the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

This is a big night, people. Irrespective of who you're pulling for in November - or who you've been pulling for the last six months - this is something to be proud of. We can get the knives back out tomorrow.

I'll tell you the whole story of this primary in 100 words or less. Ready? Start the clock...NOW!

"Hillary Clinton voted for the war in 2002, which pissed off the Democratic base. They rallied behind Obama once he proved he was viable by winning Iowa. Clinton burned through all her money by Super Tuesday and had no plan for what to do if she lost. The schedule was so front-loaded that by March, there weren't enough delegates in play for her to make a comeback. She tried to carry on as if there were still a chance, and the media indulged her so they wouldn't run out of material. Then time ran out and here we are. Yay!"

Everything else is filler. Especially the chirping about the VP spot, which I will address below...

So some folks want to know why I think McCain is going to have a turnout issue.* Here we have to go back in time a bit...

So Monday at 10 AM is the keynote for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. Also known as "Apple Mardi Gras." This is the only show of the year that is actually operated by Apple - MacWorld is actually an IDG event, and the other stuff like NAB or EDUCAUSE or PRINT '0n are their own things - and it's the only one with no exhibitors, no third-party vendors, nothing but Apple seminars and sessions all week. It also comes with a ridonkulous party Thursday night awash in free food and booze and a live musical act. (The last three years they were the Wallflowers, BT and Ozomatli, in increasing order of energy and entertainment.)

This year, we see the results of a yearlong experiment in which the entire community of MacMacs and Apple fanboys attempts to will a product into existence, i.e. the mythical "3G iPhone." I admit that the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming - the supply chain empty worldwide, AT&T denying its retail staff leave in July even as they ramp up HSDPA (HSPDA? HPSDA? WTF?) deployment, tons of mysterious boxes being unloaded in Long Beach--

OK, this is where I have to take a detour. God knows I owe my life to Apple - when I crapped out at grad school, the thing that saved me was that in three years of monkeying around with a Power Mac 6100, I had taught myself enough to be taken on as a junior support tech. Literally every penny that has come into my pocket since September 1997 has been due to or as an indirect result of something to do with Apple. So I have a certain amount of gratitude to the Monster of Cupertino for keeping me out of the produce cooler at the Piggly Wiggly.

However, the worst part about being an Apple supporter is...the other Apple supporters. You know - the recalcitrant more-Apple-than-Apple types, the ones who literally cried when they realized there was a command line in OS X and that you couldn't customize the Apple menu - the ones who would willingly throw out protected memory and preemptive multitasking because they thought the System 6 Multifinder was the pinnacle of UI achievement. The MacMacs (hat tip to the genius of John C. Welch, who is what every Mac administrator should be), who are like the seagulls in Finding Nemo, only with "Mac" instead of "Mine." You can usually tell them because they look like normal geek fanboy types, only with a rainbow-Apple sticker on the can of paste they've been eating.

These are the people who have basically said that there is an iPhone coming that will do foo, bar, and X. Either that or complaining that the iPhone is worthless without foo, bar, and X, and it should have the Newton interface. Foo, bar, and X are usually some combination of 3G, GPS, CDMA and EVDO support, voice recognition with text dictation, full-on text editing, a user-accessible command line, 1080p HD video recording, full VTOL launch capability and the power to transform into Trinity from The Matrix and Princess Leia in the metal bikini, with three-way recreation on their minds.

Now, there is probably something coming out. We know at a minimum that we're going to get either an announcement or an outright launch of the new 2.0 version of the existing iPhone firmware, incorporating support for 3rd party applications and ActiveSync/Exchange in an enterprise environment (basically throwing down the gauntlet to the Blackberry monolith). Any features beyond that, or new hardware to run them on? Purely speculation at this point. However, I am prepared to bet, and bet big, that at the end of the day Monday, whatever has been announced will still lack foo, bar, or X, and that there will be hot tears and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Here's the thing. It may sound absurd and contradictory, but it's the truth: Apple's output is not and cannot be directed towards satisfying the fanboy market.

Remember 1997? The stock was down around $15. Since then it's split 8 ways and is bumping around the mid-$180 mark. Every dollar you sunk into AAPL back in the day has jumped by close on two orders of magnitude in the ensuing decade-plus. It didn't happen because they turned their efforts toward what the geek masses desired, or stuck with satisfying the dead-ender loyalists, because that's not where the money is.

I've had about two dozen phones in the last 5 years. I had a couple of smartphones back when they were new and preposterously expensive, and I tried to do stuff with them, and in a pinch I could have done about 90% of what the iPhone does. Because I was a geek and willing to screw around with that kind of stuff.

But when a friend of mine takes her iPhone up to Canada and shows it to her parents, and they are overcome with amazement and want one almost immediately? That's where the money is. When you can go outside the expected market and captivate people, that's when stuff happens. Apple didn't make the first smartphone, they didn't make the first MP3 player either - but they made them captivating. And having had my share of MP3 players and phones, I can say with confidence that it's not all down to trendy design and an aura of hip - it's because they worked better than what was out there. Everybody remembers the famous Slashdot riff on the first iPod - "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." - but the rest of the world doesn't care about that shit. They want something that they can use easily without too much effort.

So don't get too bothered Tuesday morning when the Intarweb tubes are clogged with ranting and raving. Apple, like God or the Cylons, has a plan, and they're sticking with it. And based on ten years of paper in my pocket, I'm willing to let them play it out.

(As God is my witness, I actually do some work during the day. Honest.)

Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple's standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that's kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.

Apple has said that Adobe's flash media player, which is on hundreds of other phones, doesn't perform up to Apple's standards for the iPhone.

Listen, jackass, "flash memory" != Adobe Flash.

I always thought CNN went downhill after deciding that OJ was worth wall-to-wall coverage, but if you need more proof than this that they are butt-worthless, I can't help you.

Stagger Lee's Eighth Rule of Political Discourse:

Anyone invoking George McGovern as a signifying comparison for Presidential elections after 1984 is automatically not worth taking seriously. A similar comparison holds for Barry Goldwater (with the exception of discussions of John McCain solely related to the angle of candidates from Arizona; any other correlation will not be taken under advisement as intelligent commentary).

Any election that took place before the current candidates were able to vote is not germane to this one, and the caliber of intellectual laziness that relies on such comparisons will not be indulged by this publication. So if you seriously think we're experiencing a repeat of 1972 this year, well...

No surprises at all in the new iPhone. Yes, the much-vaunted 3G is there, but the early specs seem to indicate that actual 3G connectivity will be twice as thirsty as ordinary GSM talk time, and I expect there'll be a similar dropoff for data. GPS is interesting, but I don't know how much better it will be than the existing semi-triangulation locator.

See, here's the thing: I'm on the wrong side of 30, married, fairly socially inert, and living in Silicon Valley. I've got free Wi-Fi coming out my ears on all sides, and for the most part don't really get THAT much out of having 3G speed - there are not a lot of times when I need that kind of speed and don't have access to it. In addition, I'm not wild about the fact that the base 3G data plan is $10 a month higher - which means, when you add it all up, that the most basic upgrade to the new unit will end up costing me $440.

There's not $440 worth of delta between my iPhone and the new one. Which is actually a good thing, because that's money that could more usefully be put into, say, a new TV in time for football season. However, for all the people who held off because they wanted 3G or GPS, now you get a nice cheap option relative to what was available at launch. (Although if you buy an 8GB model now for $200, then add in the $240 from the delta in plan price, you're still paying only $60 less over 2 years than you would have at the start, and lining AT&T's pockets besides.)

Two things people wanted that I don't think will show up:

1) Video capture, to which I say - yeah, but the problem is, all but the best cameraphones still capture video at a crappy 160x120, or at best 320x240 (QVGA). One thing I've learned pretty quickly is that Apple is reluctant to include a feature that they think sucks, unless they can make it *not* suck. And I think anything less than VGA-quality video will, in Apple's collective mind, suck.

2) MMS. I would still like a better way of receiving MMS. As it stands now, though, AT&T's default method for informing non-MMS subscribers of a multimedia message is what shows up on the iPhone, complete with URL and incomprehensible ID and password. Ultimately I think the Cupertino powers that be will still say "why do you want to send crappy little pictures for a quarter a pop when you can send much better stuff in email for free with your unlimited data?" And I can see the logic there, but it would still be nice to get pix of my niece right to the phone without going through hoops.

Oh, and to whoever it was I saw on a web forum saying that the iPhone ought to have 160GB of storage the same as an iPod can: grow up.

One other note about the new iPhone: it looks like it's really just another phone now vis-a-vis AT&T. The data plans are the same (i.e. the extra $10 a month, or $25 a month for business plans - WTF?) and you can't even order the phone online from Apple - it's retail purchase and in-store activation only.

Sadly, Apple was not able to permanently shift the way cellular works in this country. But AT&T should be kissing their ass, because I can't count how many people I know who only have AT&T because of the iPhone. And if I could shift it, I'd switch to T-Mob in a second, but I need the visual voicemail...

Free IPhone 3G: European Bastards to Get Free iPhone and Great Monthly Plans. This ultimately is not surprising, since the iPhone has essentially become just another smartphone in the eyes of the carriers. With O2 in the UK, you sign up for an 18-month contract at about $90 a month, and for your trouble get 1200 minutes, 500 texts, and free data, made even more attractive by the fact that your incoming calls and texts are always free AND by the fact that you get free access to TheCloud, which is the largest commercial Wi-Fi provider in the UK - basically the equivalent of getting free access to the T-Mobile Wi-Fi service. Long story short: 18-month obligation, $1620 total cost, because that 8 GB iPhone is FREE.

Meanwhile, America: $40 for the minimum service (450 night/5000N-W min), $5 for 200 texts a month, and $30 for the unlimited data service. So you're paying $1350 for that 18 months, PLUS $200 for the 8 GB iPhone, PLUS you're using up your alloted minutes and texts to receive as well, PLUS it doesn't look like there's any free service on otherwise-paid-for WiFi networks, PLUS you're still on the hook for an additional 6 months because it's a 2-year contract. If you actually wanted to replicate the O2 offer, consider the 900-minute plan ($60/month) and assume you'd use a lot of your free nights/weekends to make up the diff. Add in the next plan up, which goes from 200 to 1500 messages ($15 a month, and you'll need those to cover the cost of what you would have received free) and the data plan (still $30) and you're at $105 a month - or, when you factor in the cost of the phone, $2090 over the first 18 months.

It was a valiant effort, but Apple has failed to break the back of the steam-age telecommunications industry in the United States. The rest of the world has moved on, but between the kind of mobility offerings we get and the fact that 256kbps is considered "broadband" for legal purposes, the fact is that we're a Third World country when it comes to 21st century communications, and that's a disgrace.

Incidentally, upon further review, if I were to upgrade it would actually cost me $680 on top of what I already pay - I forgot to factor in my FAN discount from the last job and the additional text message costs. No bloody way am I paying that kind of coin just to add 3G and GPS - that's 2/3 of a sweet big-screen TV.

God knows I carried no brief for Tim Russert's political capability, but to die at 58 - believe me when I say this - is just plain awful for everyone. Especially his family.

Hope he finds a better world than this. Hopefully one where Scott Norwood hits that kick.

Today's worse than I expected. It's what I thought Thursday would be like - and oddly, Thursday came and went without too much angst or reflection or what have you, which was a good thing, all in all. I thought maybe for once I could pass a milestone without getting all bent out of shape about it. Then I woke up today, very late, and realized "nope."

What's done is done. Obviously, I'm not over it, or I wouldn't be sullen in the corner counting the minutes until I can go down to the pub.

Happy Father's Day, pops. Cast 'em straight and drive 'em long.

Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir - NYTimes.com

Rage follows below:

Highly offensive rage against oil and bicycles follows. Not my !-ing day. Don't click unless you're ready for lots of superfluous capitals and exclamation points.

Blackwater wants lawsuit decided under Islamic law

Seriously?

(piano intro)

DA-DA Da DA-DA-DA DAAA..

I'm gonna get me a shotgun and shoot all the hippies I seeeeeee

I'm gonna get me a shotgun and shoot all the hippies I seeeeeee
When I shoot all the hippies I see
The hippies will not bug U-C.......
I'm gonna get me a shotgun and shoot all the hippies I seeeeeee

I'm gonna get me a Cal girl in a blue and gold sweater
I'm gonna get me a....

(mad love to Garrett Morris, obvs)

...from the sublime and spectacular Orson Swindle, at Every Day Should Be Saturday, the world's greatest website:

"If/when the SEC [television sports -ed.] network happens in any form, the negotiations will likely consist of the words GIMMEH GIMMEH and sacks of cash and country ham being thrown over table in both directions excitedly. This describes most commercial deals of a large magnitude in the South, actually."

...or does anyone else ever finally show up for Mass after a couple of months, and the homily may as well open with "This is directed specifically at Mr. Stag R. Lee of 72 Whooping Cough Lane, Googleburg, CA, who is married to the tall blond and drives a Rabbit"?

Huh.

In other news, I bought a cell phone. (World stops from shock.) $22 on eBay for a Nokia 1112, which is a bare-bones phone along the lines of my F3. The reason I bought it is because the F3's battery dies in 48 hours no matter what you do. Even if fully charged and left sitting on a shelf, turned off, the battery will be dead within 2 days. Meanwhile, the 1112 has been on continuously with normal use for almost 24 hours now and hasn't dropped even one bar of battery off the indicator.

(This is pretty damn bare-bones, folks: black-and-white display, NO internet connectivity, NO camera or bluetooth. Places and receives calls, sends and receives texts, has a speakerphone. The two big advantages over the F3 are T9 for texting and timed profiles (the amazing Nokia feature where you can set the phone to stay in silent mode until after the Mass/movie/teleconference/etc is over, at which point it reverts back to normal rather than staying in silent until you remember a day and a half later and realize you missed four calls and half a dozen texts).

So yeah, another couple of older phones going into the donate pile. I will probably keep the F3 a while, though, just because it's a gift - and because it's the ideal phone to use in distracting young nephews and their peers.

Meanwhile, in proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, the marine layer has broken back through the Santa Cruz mountains and the temperature is in the low 70s. I never realized how much my mood has always been affected for the worse by heat. No wonder I've always been miserable in the summer.

When OPEC first embargoed oil to help pay for the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled in only a couple of months. That kind of artificially-imposed shortage was massively disruptive, but it's the sort of thing that could be remedied easily. The problem we have now is that almost nothing about this is artificial - it's taken a decade for the price to quadruple, but here it is. Growing demand from emerging markets will sustain the price hike - Econ 101 again, remember - and as long as the dollar is weak and the price of oil is demarcated in dollars, the cost of oil will be disproportionately high in the United States.

So what is to be done? There's a lot of talk about windfall profits taxation and pursuing speculators, but there's very little there there. See above about how this has not been a speedy artificially-induced shock. You might nip a little back from ExxonMobil, but not enough to make a material difference. OK, how about ramping up production? If we approved unlimited offshore drilling and opened up ANWR right this second, you wouldn't see the oil start to flow for almost a decade - and when it did, the material impact on a gallon of gas might be a nickel. For all the hue and cry about it, there's not some massively huge vat of oil that we could have by Wednesday if it weren't for those meddling kids pesky environmentalists.

Other options - tar sands, oil shale, biodiesel, etc etc - are only commercially viable now because the price of oil is through the roof. These are not things that are going to bring back the days of glorious cheap fuel - they are things that will help keep the current price from exploding, because they will produce more goods to fulfill demand and thus maintain equilibrium. If the price of oil dropped by 25% tomorrow, there would be no point in commercial development of these alternatives, because they wouldn't be profitable.

Face facts, people: you will never again in your life see plain old 87-octane gasoline at $2 a gallon. Hell, you may never see it at $3 a gallon. This price increase is the result of market forces, which means that the price of oil is never going to drop precipitously until demand plummets or supply explodes. Which ain't gonna happen.

So what is to be done?

In the short term, not much. Everything is planning for the long term. We're just going to suffer for a few years while we come up with the workaround. In this respect, maybe more drilling seems palatable, but you're just kicking the can down the road at that point.

Things that need to be done: more transit. Problem is, outside an urban environment, it's tough to push transit - thinking of where I lived growing up, I don't know that there's any way a town bus could have been useful, because everyone's too scattered. The transit solution involves getting it somewhere it could be useful - take Birmingham, for instance, which desperately needs some sort of commuter rail down 280 and 65 between downtown and the white-flight suburbs to the south. In a town with no commuter infrastructure, where an undrained valley means that the wrong sort of weather holds smog in one place for five straight days, the potential improvements in congestion and climate just from cutting rush hour traffic are plentiful.

Something else that needs to be done: different vehicles. Here in SiliValley, people are starting to go for the ol' Vespa scooter in a big way. There are anecdotal tales of families selling one of the his-and-hers Priuses (Prii?) for a Vespa, because the Prius can be sold for exactly what they paid for it and a scooter with double the gas mileage purchased for an order of magnitude less. I know for a fact that I could totally get by on a 150cc scooter for my commute, which would get me at least triple the mileage I get now (although to be honest, it would probably take years and years before the fuel savings would pay for a scooter). People are grasping for old Geo Metros and Honda Civic VX cars from the early 90s that get in the 40s with a plain ol' gasoline engine. Hell, people are buying the Smart Fortwo out here. I am sure that the VW Polo Bluemotion would go like crazy in urban areas. And then there's the Chevy Volt, which is not a hybrid so much as it is an electric car with an onboard generator which is completely unconnected with the drive system; it's just there to charge the battery when it's not plugged in. The auto industry doesn't turn on a dime, though, so I suspect it'll be a couple or three years before that gets retooled.

Long story short: we're going to be here a while. Better start adjusting, because we're never getting back to normal. This is the new normal.

I never thought this would happen to me...but I have found that I really do like getting to work earlier than everyone else. If I can walk in with my coffee at 7:45, knowing that nobody will come in or call for at least an hour or more, and I'm able to work through my email, change the tapes on the backup servers, and generally ease into the workday - everything goes so much better. I don't really have set coverage hours here, but I have sort of chiseled out the standard 8-5 (by the way, the cliche is "9 to 5", how on earth did we end up with 8-5? Somebody wanna explain this?) and found that the best hour of the day is the first one.

I think the coffee helps. In the interest of saving money and helping force me up in the morning, I'm trying to grind my own beans again. Whole Peruvian beans from the farmer's market (roasted on Saturday, no less, they've just finished oiling out to the point I can start using them tomorrow), a grinder and a French Press (or the little one-cup filter-drip unit the wife put me onto) - and if I can get 15 minutes before leaving, I can leave with a full thermos bottle and maybe another mug besides. Whether I should drink quite that much coffee in a day is another matter. Back in the day, a cup of coffee was 8 oz - now there are some places whose large coffee is triple that size. And I know the coffee's more potent now than it was back in the day when it was half Sanka, half sawdust.

I know it's still a while until college football starts, but I am seriously fighting the urge to go out and buy a pile of Vanderbilt stuff (water bottle, valve caps, foam rubber sword, visor, etc etc). I think I may be back on the "grasp for Vandy to be my official alma mater" tip. I won't go on endlessly about that again, but suffice to say that if you had a choice between Vanderbilt and Actual Alma Mater, you'd grasp too.

BTW, that little Nokia 1112 has been on continuously for almost 3 days now and still shows a full 5 bars of battery life. I am now committed to using this until the battery dies, and at this rate, I may not go back to the iPhone before the new firmware comes out.

Man guilty of having 13 in Volvo

I don't think this even used to be a crime. I distinctly remember an incident in Jacksonville in 1989 where we had 13 people in a Honda Accord, including one in the trunk. (Which we did right after the lot of us had gone to Krystal and ordered 100 Krystals and a Diet Coke. I have a picture of the stack of boxes, a.k.a. the Krystal Palace, somewhere in my stuff at home...)

The ceiling is officially lifted on what I am prepared to believe about Clinton Portis.

Seriously, this guy is your #1 entertainment value in a league that is proverbially bereft of entertainment value. As long as Portis is slowly slipping into insanity in the full view of the public, you can no longer call it the No Fun League.

(If you don't think I'm writing in Prime Minister Yah Mon for every office on my ballot this November, you're crazy.)

So we finally figured out what it takes to beat me: line up me on one side and two dozen Boomers on the other, take all the questions from the Baby Boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit, lean heavy on the Broadway musical and pop culture categories, let them keep yelling out answers until somebody gets it right, and don't start until I'm already three beers in...

...except that it was essentially a draw.

I still got it. Somebody may eventually come take it away, but not this weekend. Meanwhile, for all my micks at the NDNation Tournament of Champions, consider your thunder officially shaken down. =)

BBC NEWS | Europe | Dutch smoking ban goes into force:

"Patrons of cannabis cafes will still be allowed to smoke marijuana as long as it is not mixed with tobacco."

And pot smoke is somehow magically better than all other forms of burnt particulate manner...how exactly? Why isn't it legal to shoot hippies for cognitive dissonance?