As anyone not living under a rock already knows, the space shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas today.

We turned on the TV to see the endlessly repeating loop of the shuttle breaking up on the local Fox station, seventeen years and four days after the explosion of the Challenger. Just the loop playing visually, while the Fox anchors spoke over and over again about Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon and Indian-born Kalpana Chawla; the five other astronauts were mentioned only in the scrolling news ticker at the bottom of the screen, in between assurances that Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge had been briefed. (I will be mightily pissed if the White House tries to manipulate this tragedy into an excuse for war.)

I was going to write "I wonder how long it'll be before space shuttle debris shows up in on eBay", but less than two hours after the explosion, some asshole had already put up an auction of SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA DEBRIS! (Link is to screen capture, as eBay took it down promptly. While I was writing this entry, another Columbia debris auction went up, and it too was taken down.)

Having tired of Fox's endless tape loop, we had switched over to NBC to watch the statements from NASA and the President, but NBC followed in Fox's footsteps; though they showed the group photo of the astronauts a couple of times during the President's speech, they showed an infographic of only one individual astronaut: Ilan Ramon. Apparently, the American astronauts (Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Dave Brown, Laurel Clark, Mike Anderson) and Ms. Chawla were too insignificant to show.

It was interesting listening to the warnings about not touching the debris. Fox News stated over and over again (in the scrolling ticker) that it was contaminated with toxic fuels, even though one of the people they interviewed said that any toxic contaminants would have been burned off in the upper atmosphere. I suppose they felt that the best way to keep people from disturbing the debris was to scare them, rather than to state (as the NASA administrators did) that it needed to remain undisturbed for the investigation into what went wrong.

But, given the two morons who apparently tried to sell it on eBay, perhaps that wasn't an unwise choice.

As if auctioning debris from the shuttle explosion on eBay wasn't bad enough, now they're also auctioning Columbia-related domain names.

And at least one of the "debris" auctions that went up today was completely bogus; a Fark reader archived the auction page here. (One giveaway that it's a fake: the coordinates of the location where the "debris" was found is in Germany, where the seller is listed as living.)

Humanity makes me sick sometimes.

"No matter what the cause, safety experts have warned for years that a problem was coming. They told Congress that the shuttle program needed more money and newer equipment or else it faced rising safety risks. Six outside consultants on a safety panel issued such warnings; they were fired in March 2001."

The television ads from the Office of National Drug Control Policy anger me.

It's not that I'm pro-drug, it's the fact that they use fallacious, manipulative, hypocritical arguments to make their point.

For example, the first Nick and Norm ad: Believe the assertion that drug money funds terrorism because it's true. That's an argument? "Because it's true"? How about some documentation? Some facts? Something other than "because we say so"?

The second Nick and Norm wasn't much better. (It seems to me the current administration doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to accusations of funding terrorists, given its gift of $43 million to the Taliban, which gave aid and support to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.)

The "pot can get you pregnant" ad during the Superbowl was simply ludicrous, but the hypocrisy of the "War on Drugs" is beautifully exemplified by the "Four Cigarettes" ad (Link to QuickTime movie).

According to this latter commercial, one joint contains as much tar as four cigarettes; so if that's a bad thing, why not stamp out tobacco use while we're at it?

Let's take a look at the government's own statistics. 14,000 drug-related deaths (all drugs, not just marijuana). 81,000 alcohol-related deaths. 430,000 tobacco-related deaths. Judging by the number of annual deaths, tobacco is over 30 times more deadly than all "drugs" combined (including things like crack and heroin). Alcohol (which, let's face it, is a drug) is over 5 times more deadly.

Yet the government is warring on marijuana, and leaving these demonstrably deadlier vices alone. Apart from the obvious fact that the government profits every time someone buys a bottle of alcohol or a pack of cigarettes, and they don't get any tax money when a stoner buys a nickel bag, what's the logic behind this?

Apparently there isn't any, which is why they have to resort to fallacious reasoning in their ads.

I'm testing out some new features in my blog code, most notably giving the user the ability to read comments in a popup window (which should load faster than the usual way), and selecting whether links will open in the same window or automatically open a new browser window. These controls are in the box just below the image of the singing potatoes.

If anything doesn't work right, and you've been here before, reload the page (you might also have to clear your browser's cache) and try again. If it still doesn't work, please email me (and let me know what operating system and browser you're using). Thanks.

I was arguing with someone recently — I don't remember who — about the meanings of words. He or she had taken the stance that the only valid definition of a word was its original definition, and that it was wrong for a dictionary publisher to alter the definitions of words to keep up with current usage; I asserted that language changes, get used to it.

Today I learned something surprising about the etymology of a word I hadn't ever given much thought to:

symposium [1580–90; < L < Gk sympósion drinking party, equiv. to sym- SYM- + po- (var. s. of pinein to drink) + -sion n. suffix]

Well, that kind of explains the Buffy symposium.

Karen and I caught the cast of The Simpsons on Inside the Actors Studio last night, and while it was certainly a treat, I was rather disappointed at some of the choices they made.

For example, they spent far too much time playing clips from the actors' favorite episodes. Did we really need to see the entire scene of Monty Burns eating the three-eyed fish? With six guests, you'd think there would be enough to talk about without wasting time on clips.

As the actors spoke in character, they blotted out the screen with more visuals from the show, only rarely showing the actual actors speaking. We never got to see Julie Kavner speaking as Marge, for example — they showed cartoon clips the entire time.

And when it came to the "Questionnaire" portion, I didn't really care to hear the characters' responses! I like learning what makes the actors tick.

Oh, well. At least it was something, and it was interesting hearing the actors speak in their own voices. Tangent: Dan Castellaneta reminds me of Armin Shimerman.

I see, from an article linked on Fark, that the Pentagon has ordered 77,000 body bags for the upcoming conflict, as well as hundreds of coffins for American soldiers to be shipped home in.

I abhor government waste, but I truly hope every penny of that is wasted.

Working in a court reporting office, I occasionally learn interesting bits of information which I probably wouldn't encounter elsewhere. For example, today I read this interesting exchange:

Q   Do you know how a seedless watermelon is created?

A   How it's created? Yeah.

Q   Okay. Can you explain that to me?

A   Triple the chromosomes inside the diploid seed cell, cross-pollinate with a family of reputable stats that you like to become a seed parent, pick out the diploid and the polyhaploids, tetraploid; regrow the tetraploid for the next season, which is your parent; cross that with a diploid, propagate the generations, you become tetraploid, tetraploid is your new seed parent, triploid is your seed offspring which is seedless.

Q   And how do you grow a seeded watermelon?

A   Throw it in the ground, water it, fertilize it, let the sun hit it.

Q   So it's much easier?

A   (Moving head up and down.)

As an aside, the court reporter said that the witness explained the method for creating a seedless watermelon in one breath.

I'm furious.

I'm not angry that the government put us on Orange Alert in large part because of a claim, made by a captured al-Qaeda member, that a dirty bomb was going to be exploded somewhere in America this week. That was a pretty sound decision, I think.

I'm not even angry that they didn't bother to give him a polygraph test until days after they acted on the information; better safe than sorry!

What pisses me off is that absolutely no mention was made of the fact that the three targets he mentioned were New York, Washington and Florida — not until after the information was determined to be false!

Oh, the government made some mention about dirty bombs, and extra pairs of eyes being added "at theme parks in Florida and California", but never once did they make reference to a specific threat against any particular location! According to Google News, this fact never made the news media until ten hours ago.

MacDill Air Force Base, which our media have thoughtfully revealed as the command center for the upcoming Gulf War, is right here in Tampa. Does anyone really believe that with a specific threat against Florida, the terrorists would choose a theme park over the nerve center of the military operation in the Middle East?

I can handle knowing that my life is in danger. But I'm really pissed off at discovering that my life — as well as the lives of my friends and loved ones — was under a specific threat and our government didn't even have the decency to let us know.

Why on earth is the screen name GodfreyShipbrook registered with AIM? I certainly never did so...

This makes twice now that the promos for 24 have shown Kiefer Sutherland saying something about a "nucular" bomb, but when the actual episode airs, they've ADRed the proper pronunciation in.

Why do people say nucular, anyway? It's not like nuclear comprises a difficult set of phonemes. I could understand the mispronunciation of uncommon words, like unguent or phaeton, but nuclear?

Addendum: Do the people who say nucular also say likular instead of likelier?

I frequently wonder, especially as I paw through the local university library's microfilm collection of Early English Books, 1475-1650, whether anything of what I have written on this site will survive my death.

Will some researcher or hobbyist, hundreds of years into the future, happen upon some future incarnation of the Wayback Machine and stumble into these pages? Would their interest be held for even a short time, or would they find it inconsequential and move on to something more worthwhile? Probably the latter, of course; I've no illusions about the worth of these pages.

This line of thought always calls to my mind Kim Novak's line from Vertigo: "Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice."

Will the people of the future take no notice of our lives, remembering only a handful of prominent names from our time, as we do of the denizens of our past? Or will archives of the Internet provide them with a more personal view? Will they read the weblogs of past, either out of curiosity about times gone by or for the voyeuristic thrill of reading the daily lives of those who came before them?

Of course, that all assumes that we don't wipe ourselves off the face of the planet first. (Aren't I cheerful tonight?)

Miners used to use canaries to test for the presence of deadly gas. Apparently, the ASPCA or PETA have gotten to the US Marines, because instead of using canaries or other expendable animals, they've decided to use their own men to determine whether there are deadly chemical or biological contaminants in the area.

This was just a drill. There was no gas, and everybody knew it. In combat, however, the Marines realize the chosen ones might panic and put up a fight. So just in case, the other Marines always disarm those whose masks are to be removed - by force if necessary.

Jesus muscular Christ.

This afternoon, I popped by the Indian restaurant on my block for some papadams. They asked me to take a seat at the bar while they made some fresh ones for me; since papadams are much better when they're piping hot, I certainly didn't argue.

As I waited, I watched the sitcom that was playing on the TV. I couldn't understand a word of it, but it seemed awfully familiar. When I first started watching, it showed a man and a woman talking; the man seemed upset about something. He was wearing a ridiculous 70s-porn moustache and a weird outfit, but soon the woman made a gesture and he turned into a nebbishy office worker. He left and went to his desk, where another man — his boss, I presume — arrived and began berating him for something. Cutting back to the woman, another woman appeared and started speaking in a disapproving tone of voice; the first woman referred to her as "Mama" (though they only looked a few years apart) and spoke defensively.

"This has to be the Indian version of Bewitched," I thought to myself. Lo and behold, it is. The male protagonist even works at an ad agency, just like Darren Stevens.

With all the computer geeks in the SCA, I'm surprised that there aren't more obvious representatives in the NationStates game. There are only two nations in An Tir, two in Lochac and two in the Outlands. (And now one in Trimaris.)

I'm pleased to note that my nation is described as an "Inoffensive Centrist Democracy", though undoubtedly that will change as I make decisions on the daily issues. Not quite as thrilled that my choices resulted in "below average" political freedoms, but them's the breaks.

Update: Political freedoms now "good". Take that, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan!

"Why can't you just masturbate like the rest of us?"

Best. Line. Ever.

However, the first half of the episode was fairly slow; fortunately, it eventually picked up and turned into actual storyline.

It also had some blatant errors, especially in the Andrew-the-Auteur segments. For example, during the basement whiteboard sequence, he was purportedly manipulating the camera with the remote control. Zooms are fine, but a consumer videocamera like that won't jump into and out of closeup, and I haven't seen one yet that would aim via the remote. Not to mention the fairly blatant goof where Andrew's shadow reveals that he's not actually holding the camera.

In Windows ME, Wordpad could read and write Microsoft Word .DOC files. In Windows XP, Wordpad will read .DOC files, but it won't write them.

Fortunately, there are alternatives.