Amidst the coverage of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, no one appears to have noticed the irony: that all this righteous outrage is aimed at preserving the graven images of a man who built a doctrine out of the struggle to cast aside material things.

Manufacturing Little Commie Eminems

In the United States, rap and hip-hop grew from the streets. But in China, a campaign to create home-grown hip-hop performers is, like so much else, the product of scientific planning, government intervention, expert input and, of course, tests.

Scientist Ignore Every Sci Fi Movie

By tinkering with genes, scientists have made tomatoes that stay fresher longer, crops that are immune to weedkillers and fish that grow faster. Now, a genetically engineered insect is emerging from the lab.
The first field trial of a biotech insect — a pink bollworm moth that contains a jellyfish gene — is planned for this summer. The gene gives the moth larvae a fluorescence that allows scientists to more easily track them and monitor their behavior.
If the experiment involving a major pest to cotton growers goes as planned, scientists are ready with their next step: testing a biotech version, called the “Terminator” by farmers, that is sterile, but sexually active; it is designed to mate with wild relatives and eliminate their offspring.

Girl Scouts Hacked

Click on the link to be taken to an image of the hack courtesy of attrition.org.

Lousy Lover Looking To Shift Blame

Given the choice, William Stowell says he would have kept his foreskin.
Since the choice was made for him, he is suing the hospital where he was born and circumcised for depriving him of “the pleasure of natural, normal sexual intercourse.”
Stowell says his sex life would be much better if he had been allowed to keep his foreskin , the loose fold of skin that covers the tip of the penis. But his mother denied that to him when she signed a circumcision consent form in the maternity ward where she gave birth; she says now that it was a mistake.

Why didn’t I hear this on the news??

Ted Turner, who in the past has managed to insult Christians, Poles, blacks and women, among others, called Catholic employees at a CNN gathering “Jesus freaks,” according to Fox News and the New York Post, which is owned by the network.
The occasion was a meeting in the Washington newsroom prior to a party for departing broadcaster Bernard Shaw, which took place on Ash Wednesday.
Turner, who is co-founder of the news network, took notice of a few foreheads smudged with ash, according to the report.
“I was looking at this woman and I was trying to figure out what was on her forehead,” he reportedly said. “At first I thought you were in the [Seattle] earthquake. I realized you’re just Jesus freaks.”

put this on springer…

bizarre tale of crossgender/animal abuse/drug abuse/ murder & mutilation. not for the squeamish….

Women Think Everyman Is a Stripper

A 19-year-old FSU student making deliveries for a local chicken wing emporium told Tallahassee police he was groped when a group of women at a bachelorette party mistook him for a male stripper….
When an officer who was dispatched to investigate knocked on the hotel room door, he heard a voice asking inside: “Is that the stripper?”

Happy Birfday, applelard!

*hugs*

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
But in your dreams whatever they be
Dream a little dream of me.

I’m going to bed.

Nite!

anyone care to test?

Most recent model Oki brand cellular phones have an undocumented feature that you can amuse yourselves with. If you enter the proper commands, your phone will work like a scanner and you can listen to the conversations of others.

Try this at home kids!

-Press keys 7 and 9 simultaneously.
-Press menu, send, end, rcl, sto, clr sequentially
-Press keys 1 and 3 simultaneously

You should now be in a special test menu.

If you have a portable you must either:
-press #, 7, 6, snd
or
-press #, 7, 7, snd

(one command routes output audio to the earpiece, the other command routes the output audio to the ringer, which is louder)

-Press #, 7, 9, snd
(this command lets you enter certain subsequent commands with one keystroke)

-Press 2 (this command unmutes the receive audio)

-Press 9,0,3,6,0,0,8,0,0,0,2,snd

Your phone should now be scanning between channel 0360 and channel 0800, the last two digits (02) represent the scan speed (01 is faster 03 is slower etc). Pressing # stops the scan, pressing # again resumes the scan. To scan with new parameters press clr and repeat the last step.

If you’re only interested in on specific channel, say channel 100, press 9,0,1,0,0,snd

The real fun however, is flipping the carrier on and bumping the person on the land-line end of the conversation off the cell, and telling the mobile phone user to please deposit 25 cents or pretending to be at the location where the land line user is and improvising from there.

After you have executed the #,7,9,snd command, simply pressing the 1 key will turn the carrier on. Pressing 1 again will turn the carrier off. In my post I said you could cut the land-line party out of the conversation, I got this backwards, if your signal is stronger than the mobile user, you will be connected to the person on the land-line end of the conversation. This is easy to do because, by default, the phone operates at the highest power level in test mode, whereas in actual use the cell tells the phone at which of 8 possible power levels to transmit at.

Even if you are successful at blocking the signal of the mobile user, there are a couple of things you need to do in order for the person on the land line end to hear your voice. In order to be able to reuse frequencies more often, many radio systems use ‘tone-coding’ to distinguish between different sets of users who share the same frequency. In cellular systems adjacent cells don’t use the same channels, but every 2nd of 3rd cell might resuse the same channels. In order for cells to be able to determine that a signal originated within the cell rather that from a nearby cell, cellular transmissions are coded with one of 3 possible background tones. Each cell recognizes one of the 3 tones, it is a matter of trial and error to determine which one. Pressing 6 followed by 0,1,2 or 3 as an argument sets the tone to be used during transmission (I forget whether 0 or 3 means tone off).

In order for the other person to hear you, you must also press the 3 key, this unmutes the transmit audio, pressing 3 again remutes it.

It is not possible to get two cell phones to talk directly to each other. This is because cell-phone conversations are duplexed, phones are simultaneously transmitting and receiving on different frequencies.

This means that cell-phone transmit freq = cell receive freq and cell-phone receive freq = cell transmit freq.

I don’t have an actual tech manual, but just some scattered notes, I’ll try to dig up some more goodies.

I think this is a great idea… jamming cell phones… no more of that movie theatre irritation.

I don’t see that as a public safety issue, as they’ll be used in public places where other folks will be, plus, the jammers can be turned off and on at will by the owners.

Wow. A good Monday. 🙂

Jobs were obtained (not by me, but by people that could certainly use one more than I.. 🙂 )

Got my batteries for my phone, for free… (had some rechargeables banging around here at work)

Newtie was very lovey this morning, kept coming over and giving me licks and sweetness…

Looks like the big boss is in a good mood, so hopefully that’ll trickle down.

saw this… poor hunter is quite an angry man… but I want to see the movie made!

sung by big bird…

Be kind to the river
Be good to the trees
Smile at the sunshine
And bow to the breeze
Say “thanks for the perfume”
Of every flower you sniff
What a world
What a place
What a gift

Respect the deer and buffalo
The lion and tiger too
Be kind to dogs and pussycats
And they’ll be kind to you
Take care of the forest
And fish in the sea
Look after the beetle
The ant and the bee
Say “thanks for the raindrops”
And all the clouds that drift
They’re for you
They’re for me
They’re a gift

They’re for you
They’re for me
They’re for everyone
They’re a gift

Random Plot Generator!

Talk about a good way of generating plot seeds!

Not sure which word is cooler…

beverage or compress (cahm-press)

they’re both fun to say.

In case you forgot….

This baby can dig holes at an incredible rate and is destined to lead us to an underground utopia and a new age of enlightenment. Perhaps that’s why he is known to the children as Ultrababy X. I think he wants to recruit little Lexie into his legion of Superbabies.

(super-Newtie is a reserve member)

…Kung fu fighting…

Oh, I’m in little nerd-boy heaven.

I just saw concurrent ads for harry potter, lord of the rings and the planet of the apes remake.

This coming summer and Christmas will be good movies, methinks.

How evil is it to put tracking links in posts (I’m curious to see if I put one in an entry, how many pops it would get… but I certainly don’t want to put anyone off)

Feeling rather frisky today… maybe I should work a love interest into the story…

“Akimbo” is one of the strangest words in the English language, and seems almost to have been invented to mystify folks, especially children. I remember reading many stories as a child in which various characters were described as standing with their “arms akimbo,” and being utterly clueless as to what the term meant. Of course, after a little while it dawned on me that I was growing up in a house awash in dictionaries and so I looked it up, but it still strikes me as a very odd word.

For those readers who still haven’t figured out what the word means, the late John Ciardi gave a vivid definition of “akimbo”: “With hands on hips and elbows sharply bent outwards, a body posture indicating impatience, hostility or contempt.” One of the odd things about “akimbo” is that, strictly speaking, the word only applies to this “hands on hips” stance, although metaphorical uses are occasionally seen, such as “legs akimbo” or even “mind akimbo.”

The origins of “akimbo” are a bit obscure, but it most likely comes from the Old Norse “i keng boginn,” meaning “bent in a curve” (the Norse “bogi” is also the source of our “bow”). The phrase entered English around 1400 as “in kenebow,” and then spent the next few hundred years mutating through forms such as “on kenbow,” “a kimbow,” “a kenbo” and “a-kimbo” until it finally arrived at its modern hyphenless “akimbo” form.

dang it. the phone I just bought requires 4AA batteries, for the caller ID to work.

(all my rechargeables here are AAA)

and it didn’t even come with cheapie fillers… nor does it say anywhere “batteries not included”…

Ack. oh well, back to radio shack tomorrow. I’m in for the day.

(I use rechargeables… nicer on the pocketbook and the environment…I’d prefer a plug in the wall option, at least… pooties. )