POTD

Little boy at a September 11th memorial.

Harpers Magazine: The following items were among those found in the last two years during California’s Coastal Cleanup Day, an annual event in which volunteers remove debris from the state’s shorelines.

Escape Route is a global photography gallery with a cool, 3-D navigation scheme.

[via Outwardly Normal]

craigslist > portland: To the MAN who DID his hoochie on my hood

POTD

Ignore consumer spending. Ignore durable goods orders. Ignore housing starts, GDP, and wage averages. In a brainfart of shocking force, Vice President Cheney suggests that we should measure the health of the economy based on...wait for it...sales on EBay. Lets all hope that Mr. Cheney is just playing dumb, and that he actually understands the difference in magnitude between EBay sales and the United States economy.

At least John Edwards had something snarky to say about it:

"If we only included bake sales and how much money kids make at lemonade stands, this economy would really be cooking [...]"

Very interesting. IBM releases the first typewriter with a proportional font in 1941. I do believe that 1941 is before 1972. Lets keep digging.

CNS News: 60 Minutes' Documents on Bush Might Be Fake

Update: Corrected above to be CNS news. Was CBS. Oops.

The musical satire at this site continues to amuse me. This one is called "Dick is a Killer."

The Onion: Bush Campaign More Thought Out Than Iraq War

Uh, what happens when an Onion article is not just funny, but also true? Are they still satire?

Oh, what a wonderful site for software developers: The Daily WTF.

Collections of asinine code snippets, like the following gem, intended to convert bytes to kilobytes:

numSize = len(fa.size) - 3
strSize = left(fa.size, numSize) & "K

I have plenty of things to submit to them.

Stylus Magazine: Top Ten Albums on Which the Sequencing Is Lost on CD.

POTD

As you can see, I'm in a bit of a slump. Haven't had much time for pretty pictures.

I saw the Ben Barnes interview on CBS last night. More allegations, but no smoking guns. Barnes claims to have given preferential treatment to George W. Bush to get him in the "champaign unit" of the Texas Air National Guard. No surprise there. George W. Bush has always lived a life of privilege, receiving special treatment because of his family ties.

More interesting were the new ANG memos that surfaced. They pretty clearly indicate that Bush was declared unfit for service in the Guard. At that point, according to regulation, he should have been assigned to two years of active duty service, but was allowed to continue working in the political campaign in Alabama. I'm sure more details about this will surface; detauis surrounding Bush's service, why he was not assigned to active duty, and why these documents were not released until now.

Wow. George W. Bush singing Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

Apple has released a security update for MacOS X. Lots of basic stuff updated. Consider updating if you have OS X machines out on the wild and wooly internet.

Talking Points Memo has what they claim to be a letter from President Jimmy Carter to Senator Zell Miller.

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," [via the AP]

This does not appear to be leadership. This is a desperate scare tactic. Is it just me, or do we appear to be living in a dark, dark time?

Oooh. I want one.

What on Earth is this? Can this possibly be a real commercial?

"The US army plans to end a contract given to Halliburton to provide its troops in Iraq with logistical support, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The army will put the work out to contract, the newspaper says, quoting an army memorandum which estimates the contract to be worth $13bn."

I'm sure there is a terribly interesting backstory here. I'd love to hear it.

Via BBC News.

Author Kitty Kelley says in her biography The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, that the US President first used coke at university in the mid-1960s.

She quotes his former sister-in-law Sharon Bush who claims: "Bush did coke at Camp David when his father was President, and not just once either."

Other acquaintances allege that as a 26-year-old National Guard, Bush "liked to sneak out back for a joint or into the bathroom for a line of cocaine".

Lots of Buzz related to Kitty Kelly's upcoming book on the Bush family. Apparently, a scandalous television news report will be coming out, too.

Good info and links for setting up and using Subversion on MacOS X.

George W. Bush involved in an illegal abortion?

East Broadway Ron is running an article about one French journalist's experiences being arrested and detained during the Republican Convention in New York City. I back the police 100% in keeping the city safe, but they stepped over the line in many ways: false arrest, holding people in unsafe conditions, lack of due process.

'From 2000 through 2003 the median household income fell by $1,500 (in 2003 dollars) - a significant 3.4 percent decrease. That information becomes startling when you consider that during the same period there was a strong 12 percent increase in productivity among U.S. workers. Economists will tell you that productivity increases go hand-in-hand with increases in the standard of living. But not this time. Here we have a 3.4 percent loss in real income juxtaposed with a big jump in productivity."

The Economic Policy Institute, via The New York Times

"The United States has been tracking employment statistics since 1939, and never in history has it taken this long to regain the jobs lost over a downturn."

The martial arts. Ancient, mysterious fighting techniques.

[via vowe.net]

Ten Stupid Things Managers Do To Screw Up Performance Appraisal

Rense.com: The Top 25 Censored News Stories.