weight – 152 oz

got his poop meds, seem to work. $6

This is “coprolite”: fossil feces, dinosaur dung, petrified poop… rocks tens of millions of years old…the fossilized leavings of dinosaurs and other extinct animals. Like all petrified fossils, coprolite is made of different materials, depending on what the medium of petrification was. On the left, the agate-like material has been sliced and polished from a larger chunk. On the right, a small pyramid of spheres is made of Alabama marcasite. They are enlarged about twice life size.

Counter to what some folks might say, you can polish a turd. 🙂

BlackICE defender is totally worthless.

ZoneAlarm, however, rocks the house as a firewall. bye-bye nasty bots.

I downloaded the current, completely free, version of ZoneAlarm 2.6 from the ZoneLabs web site and installed it on the “Sitting Duck” laptop. Upon restarting the machine I was gratified to receive immediate notification that the Zombie/Bot was attempting to make an outbound connection to its IRC chat server.

Meanwhile, the Sub7 Trojan was sitting quietly waiting for someone to connect to it. So I used another machine to “Telnet” to the port the Sub7Server Trojan was listening on. Up popped ZoneAlarm asking whether the nonsense-looking random character name the Sub7Server had chosen for itself should be allowed to accept a connection from the Internet.

Perfect performance from ZoneAlarm.

speaking of which,…

As you will see on the page below, if you use the RealNetworks RealDownload, Netscape/AOL Smart Download, or NetZip Download Demon utilities in their default configuration . . .

EVERY TIME you use one of these utilities to download ANY FILE from ANYWHERE on the Internet, the complete “URL address” of the file, along with a UNIQUE ID TAG that has been assigned to YOUR machine, and — in the case of Netscape’s SmartDownload only — YOUR computer’s individual Internet IP address, is immediately transmitted to the program’s publisher.

This allows a database of your entire, personal, file download history to be assembled and uniquely associated with your individual computer . . . for whatever purpose the program’s publishers may have today, or tomorrow.

VERY IMPORTANT: When I re-examined my findings in the face of RealNetworks’ insistence that I was absolutely wrong about my conclusions, I caught something that I had missed before: My exact personal name and private eMail address was being sent back to RealNetworks whenever I downloaded a file. When I confronted RealNetworks with this, they explained that it was due to the fact that I had purchased a product from them in the past, and the “cookie” my system had received during the purchase was being returned to them.

That certainly makes file downloads seem far less “anonymous” than RealNetworks continues to allege.

see more info here – http://grc.com/downloaders.htm

How can you tell if there’s a banjo player at your door?

They can’t find the key, the knocking speeds up, and they don’t know when to come in.

Palookaville used to be a thriving, bustling
neighborhood on the edge of the city. Inhabited by circus folk, the
neighborhood depended on the circuses, carnivals, parades and parties
that went on throughout the city. When the economy took a downturn,
the residents of Palookaville found themselves unemployed and
disenfranchised. Unfortunately, most banks, auto garages and
landscaping firms have no use for someone skilled at making balloon
animals or throwing cream pies. The out-of-work Clowns and other
circus people turned to crime and the occassional rioting in the
streets. The police cracked down hard but that only served to make
the situation even worse. Finally, the Mayor (Da Honorable Joey
Boombatz) signed a peace treaty with the leaders of Palookaville and
created a special police force comprised of Clowns. The Clown Cops
were born.

Continue reading Clown Cops RPG →

Bears Burn Forest
============================
Smokey Bear might have stern words for some of his Alaskan cousins. Brown bears pawing through debris at a land fill on Alaska’s Afognak Island, about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage, touched off a four-acre wildfire earlier this week, officials reported.
“I haven’t actually heard of bears doing anything like this,”

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/05/31/bears.fire.reut/index.html

Teller Talks About Jackasses
=================================
When I first heard the story, it went like this: One winter night a thirteen-year-old boy was watching TV with his friends. No adults were in the house. On came a show in which a handsome hipster doused himself with gasoline, set himself afire, and danced around. The hipster was dressed in a protective fireproof suit, but the innocent boy didn’t know that. To him it looked as though soaking oneself in gasoline and setting oneself afire were safe and fun. The boy took some gasoline and a lighter into his snowy back yard and tried the stunt himself. He was gruesomely burned from head to toe—a victim of parental neglect, or irresponsible media manipulation, or maybe both.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/06/teller.htm

74 Immigrants Held for Ransom in Home
=================================
Police found 74 suspected illegal immigrants being held for ransom in a South Los Angeles house Wednesday evening; a third of them were crammed in a small attic.
http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20010531/t000045482.html

I’m Calling My Mom!
=================================
Pupils are using their mobile phones to call their parents during lessons to complain about their teachers, heads say. Unaware of the situation, head teachers were then finding themselves face to face with angry parents, general secretary of the National Association of Heads Teachers, David Hart, told delegates at the union’s annual conference in Harrogate.
“There are too many ‘parents from hell’ who delight in making the lives of heads and their staffs as difficult as possible.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/education/newsid_1362000/1362196.stm

Attention Spans Shorten So Much, People Forget AIDS Will Kill Them
=================================
Young gay and bisexual men, especially in the black community, are becoming infected with HIV at rates similar to those seen when the AIDS epidemic peaked in the mid-1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. In a study released to mark the 20th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, U.S. health experts warned that the disease might be poised to make a strong comeback, particularly among gay and bisexual males between the ages of 23 and 29.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010531/ts/health_aids_dc_2.html

Republicans Get Threatening Over Defection
=================================
In the wake of his announced defection from the Republican Party last week, soon-to-be Independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont has received a number of death threats, his spokesman said Thursday.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/05/31/jeffords.threats/index.html

Dead Thrift Store Find
=================================
Fran Osborn considered the box carefully. It certainly wasn’t anything she’d display in her home – a modest box sealed in faux-black-marble shelf paper, with the initials M.P.G. written in rhinestones. But it intrigued her. She shook it. It rattled. Probably rocks, her husband said. “Jewelry,” she thought, and she decided to gamble. So Ms. Osborn carried it to the counter at the Genesis Thrift Store on Oak Lawn Avenue, paid a dollar plus sales tax and carted the mystery package to the car…Inside the box, Ms. Osborn found a second box with a tag on top. On the tag was a name: Millard P. Griffin, and the words Metrocrest Funeral Home, Carrollton. And in that second box lay the cremated remains of Mr. Griffin, a Dallas resident who died on July 10, 1996, at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
http://www.dallasnews.com/metro/stories/380416_newashes_30met.html

http://www.msnbc.com/news/580455.asp

The newest email virus hitting the Web doesn’t even have a virus attached to it. In fact, it isn’t even *about* a virus.

An email making the rounds warns Windows users they should immediately delete a file on their computers called Sulfnbk.exe because it’s a virus undetectable by any software inoculation – and that’s because it’s not a virus, its an applet that changes short file names back into long ones.

But people are forwarding the message to all their friends to be, what, helpful or something.

don’t spread the fraud.

anchorite (ANG-kuh-ryt) noun, also anchoret

One who lives in seclusion; a hermit.

[Via Middle English, Medieval Latin, Late Latin, Late Greek, from Greek anakhoretes, to withdraw.]

And now, for something completely different:

The most referenced frog in Iraq, after the crunchy ones….

The frog-7 rocket. For More info, look here. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/frog-7.htm

Hubris and Gnosis
and psychohypnosis
the land of livejournal
is not in the knowsis
if your holding bag’s handy
you may need some doses
the minister’s daughter
is missing some toeses
there’ll be fewer survivors
than midwinter roses
Hubris and Gnosis
and psychohypnosis

Things seen on the walk this morning… looks like road construction is completed over on Atlantic, so I can take my ‘regular route’ again tomorrow. Lots of car traffic, but minimal pedestrians. I stopped in at the Walgreens, got a big honking bottle of water (1/2 gallon jug) and polished it off before I was halfway home… I think I’m going to try to cut down and slowly wean out soda-pop again.

Lots of little things on my mind, like fizz-bubbles in a soda. I move my mind to one thing, and a different bubble spins up, and gets in the way, making me think of something else. Story ideas, character studies.

Just did a little research… I’ve noticed that I’ve posted at least once a day (I’d say my average is maybe 5 a day) since mid-august of last year.

I wonder if I’ll make it a whole year without breaking stride? I also notice that I’ve plateaued with readers… I’ve been at about this number for the last few months… some come and some go, but the count remains the same. I notice that some people run away when I go on a post-frenzy (more than ten in a day seems to be what it takes) and I can understand that… I’m amazed that so many people really care about anything I have to say, and share my taste in what I find to be amusing. I feel good about that.

In other news, I just got an e-mail that a hippie acquaintance of mine died of a heroin overdose early this week… It’s a real shame, because I thought he had gotten past that part of his life, cleaned up in a detox about a year ago. I don’t know the whole story, but what I do know is that he was between places to live, having had an argument with his dad (Mikey was 26, and had moved back in with his father, last I’d heard). I guess he started using again as a result. I had really thought he’d gotten his act together… He was going to a trade school to be an electrician, had a girlfriend… I wonder how she’s taking it (I never even met her, he hooked up when he moved back up north.)

Ah well, his funeral is a long distance away…I can’t attend, but I’d better make arrangements to send flowers, and make a donation to the local shelter in his memory today. Maybe I should call his father, but I really don’t know him. How sad to outlive your child… and to part on what I assume were less than warm and fuzzy terms.

I’m really not too sad about this, maybe it hasn’t sunk in yet, more disappointed in the loss… a waste of a good, useful member of society. He was going to make a point of being more of a benefit to the species than a drain on it. He was friendly, and good company even with strangers. I hope you’re in a better place now, Mikey.