drat fink

hold the line

the fun never ends here. looks like my phone line is fixed but in the process the verizon repairman knocked out my upstairs neighbors line. unfortunately he is an mci customer and despite the fact that the verizon guy screwed it up they wont repair it. so now im waiting for mci to come and fix his line sometime between now and the end of time. and all of this (again) because my asshole neighbors have a penchant for fucking up the lines which runs beneath their access to the roof. which reminds me of the time a couple of years ago when they blamed the chinese for breaking the line. they claimed they were trying to steal long distance by tapping into our phones. the repairman and i had a good chuckle over that one. i thought the neighbors were just rude insensitive and boorish, but now im wondering if theyre not more than a bit touched in the head. they could all use a good spanking, preferably with a two by four.

we now return you to your regularly scheduled reprogramming.

now i just got a call from mci. theyre bouncing it back to verizon but they wont come until tomorrow morning. at least they called and didnt leave me waiting all day. is there some version of repairman's stockholm syndrome.

down and outsourcing

my phone is down til tuesday. so i am unofficially on hiatus.

nothing but net

"Bin Laden and his henchmen had hit on a truth about soccer. The sport, which in the U.S. is chiefly a placid entertainment for children, arouses in the rest of the world collective passions that are matched by nothing short of war. And unlike any other sport -- indeed, unlike almost any cultural phenomenon -- soccer is distinguished by its political malleability. It is used by dictators and revolutionaries, a symbol of oligarchy and anarchy. It gets presidents elected or thrown out, and it defines the way people think, for good or ill, about their countries."

puff daddies

dnArt

"All of these productions, like so much contemporary art, reflect the way we view the power of genetics — for good or otherwise — to create new, extended and possibly transformed lives for us. Yet what underlies these fantasies and fears is a simple and unsurprising fact. As Lisa Vincler, a bioethicist and assistant attorney general in Washington State, put it bluntly, "Our culture just doesn't have an attitude that's very accepting of death." Billions of dollars in new genome-based drugs will be made on the principle that we are impatient with nature's judgments. And for all its wariness, this new gene art now finds itself pulled into the colossal force field that science and money have made."

rich man, porous managers

"But as we need some version of a Warren Commission to get to the bottom of what went wrong, so we need an inverted Manhattan Project (one that will stop a bomb rather than build one) to recruit America's best minds to set things right. Mr. Ridge, a decent politician with no expertise in intelligence or counterterrorism, is a frivolous choice for security czar. Mr. Ashcroft, an aspiring J. Edgar Hoover isolated from reality by a circle of cronies, lacks the intellect and leadership ability to take on an adversary as cunning as Osama bin Laden. What he cares about most is maximizing his own power, and not just over civil liberties. His Justice Department has joined in the effort to block Mr. Ridge from consolidating the four overlapping agencies in charge of watching American borders. Now we learn, with the news of his suppression of the F.B.I. Phoenix memo, that Mr. Ashcroft will even cut the president out of the loop of law-enforcement embarrassments occurring on his watch."

880 oncologists cant be wrong

"Medical marijuana can be a legitimate treatment for cancer patients who are nauseated by chemotherapy, AIDS patients who lose their appetites and other seriously ill people. In cases where a patient is considering stopping treatment because of the agony, or cannot keep food down, medical marijuana can be life-saving. The federal government's attempt to block its use flies in the face of mainstream medical opinion. One Harvard study of 2,000 oncologists found that 44 percent had recommended marijuana to patients undergoing chemotherapy."

two can play at that game

"An experimental remote-controlled fighter jet developed by the US military has performed its first test flight."

"LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- After watching the popularity of video gaming grow into a $9 billion business last year, the U.S. military is launching a video game with an eye toward recruiting."

having visions

"We went last week to a demonstration of television on the sixty-second floor of the R.C.A. Building, where some rather startling images were ending up after being tossed around the midtown district. We sat in a darkened room squarely in front of a receiving set and, as we understand the matter, the persons and objects which we saw were down on the third floor of the same building, where they were first photographed televisually by an iconoscope, thence sent by direct wire to the Empire State Building, and then came back on a megacycle to the sixty-second floor of R.C.A. The magical unlikelihood of this occasion was not lessened any by the fact that a stranger wearing a telephone around his neck was crawling about on all fours in the darkness at our feet. This didn't make television seem any too practical for the living room of one's own home, although of course homes are changing."

denver nuggets

"An advertising firm is handing out signs to panhandlers with a plug for the company — a stunt homeless advocates say trivializes the plight of those on the streets."

"Laminated signs with snappy messages such as, "At Least I'm Not Spamming Your E-Mail," and "Hell, It Beats a Cubicle," have begun replacing cardboard placards normally waved by panhandlers at motorists."