Some quick takes on a lot of things I’ve been accumulating.

Forteana:
–Champ, the Nessie-like creature that supposedly inhabits Lake Champlain, has been sighted again.

–Some people just have a dark cloud hanging over their heads. A woman in Lombani, Zimbabwe has a hail of falling stones following her! She believes an evil spell was cast over her. Her family and neighbors have kicked her out of the village.

–The mysterious “blob” that washed ashore in Chile last year has finally been identified. DNA testing has shown that it’s just a bunch of decomposing whale blubber. One is reminded (for some reason) of the infamous exploding whale of Oregon incident (memorialized here in print by Dave Barry, and here in the infamous video).

Technology:
–New-fangled “thin client” computing is predicted to be the next big wave in networking. Yeah, we used to call them “mainframes”.

–As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, now our computers may be making us sick. The electomagnetic field produced by computers may be causing our bodies to produce excessive amounts of seratonin, which contributes to tiredness and depression.

–An interesting opinion piece on the practice of “tethering”, making content proprietary to the device it’s used on.

–Archivists are working to save the only audio recording of JFK’s assassination. It seems the original, recorded over a police motorcycle radio, is now too fragile to even play, and no quality reproductions were ever made. Goodness knows, the JFK conspiracy theorists could use some extra fodder.

–Also in digital restoration news, the Film and Television Archive at the University of California has restored the 1914 silent comedy, “Tilly’s Punctured Romance”. Widely considered to be the first feature-length comedy, it starred Charlie Chaplin in one of his early roles (relatively early, considering he appeared in 34 films in 1914, his first year of movie acting), and was pieced together from 13 copies.

–Speaking of movies: theater owners, take note.

–It’s now the 21st century. Where are the flying cars? I WAS PROMISED FLYING CARS!

–On an even lighter note, this guy has put together “The Case That Must Not Be Named”, a casemod inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. (Thanks yet again to bOINGbOING.)

Politics:
–From Fahrenheit 9/11 to Fahrenheit 451: Atty General Ashcroft ordered despository libraries to destroy five publications containing legal information not “appropriate for external use”. (Apparently Ashcroft considers public knowledge of the law to be dangerous. Yeah, ’cause we might find out what he’s up to.) Fortunately, the order was later rescinded. I don’t even have time to go into a rant about how angry it makes me that the “Justice” Department even *considered* making federal law information inaccessable to the public. I’m worried that now that their open attempt to occlude the law failed, they may pull something even more insidious in secret.

–Florida: the state that just keeps on giving and giving…ulcers and migraines, that is. The state, never having recovered from the 2000 elections, and still being critized for its planned use of electronic voting machines this November, announced that a computer crash had caused them to “lose” data compiled from its first use of touch-screen voting machines. How, um, convenient. Does Florida even realize that *no one* trusts them on voting issues anymore? Who the hell are they trying to fool? (Oh, and isn’t Florida’s new Secretary of State even scarier-looking than Kathleen Harris?)

–Finally, Minnesota’s Republican Party has asked its members to go door-to-door and collect information on their neighbors’ voting habits. On the surface, they claim that it is nothing more than a streamlining of their phone and mailing lists. My personal opinion is that neighbors reported as non-Republicans are going on a sort of “watch” list. Me, I plan to screw with the data if any of my “neighbors” come knocking on my door to grill me about my political leanings. Then I’m going to pull the shades and take out a restraining order.

Errata:
–Brandi and a shrunken head. Separated at birth?

–The Daily Oliver. No, it’s not me. It’s some guy’s weimaraner. But a cute weimeraner.

–Vintage comic book ads. Back when we were young and gullible.

I was listening to Midday on the car radio yesterday. Having come into the program midway, I didn’t catch who the speaker was, but he was saying something that interested me. He said that there is no war on terrorism. We’re waging war on terrorists, on individuals, not on the culture from which terrorism is spawned. Until we begin fighting the root causes of terrorism, we will never eliminate terrorism. As one terrorist is eliminated, another will replace him. You can only eliminate terrorism by removing the urge to commit terrorism. If the folks in the White House would only look at our decades-old “war on drugs”, they would see that this approach has failed before.

I later learned when I checked the online schedule that the person I’d been listening to was none other than Thomas Friedman, the conservative globalization-hugging columnist. He and I have never agreed on anything. Mr Friedman seems to not understand that trade globalization–in the widely-used model he so enthusiastically endorses–not only destroys the economies of struggling, smaller nations (Venezuela) but damages our own economy when we outsource to rising economies such as India. Studies performed with real-world models have shown that when a highly developed country with high wages (the US, for example) outsources to a rising economy with lower wages (India, for example), the wages of the developed country will decline as the wages of the underdeveloped country rise until both achieve a median wage. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but in a nutshell the end effect is that American wages will decline while the price of goods rise or remain the same. For those of you who don’t remember the ’70s & ’80s well, that’s called “inflation”, and it’s bad for an economy.

BTW, Mr Friedman’s speech can be heard here.