Your name in cheese.

Your name in cheese.

Here's a nice bit of

Here's a nice bit of political fantasy: GOP Anger at President Gore's War Actions.

Laura Bush gave the weekly

Laura Bush gave the weekly radio address today, standing in for the president. It was the first time a first lady had ever done so. Now, personally I don't have a problem with that. But could you imagine the stink the Republicans and Clinton-haters would have raised had Hillary ever done it?

New link here: markpasc.blog. Mark

New link here: markpasc.blog.

Mark was interested in yesterday's link to Alton Brown, and mentioned that there was a Good Eats Yahoo! Group. I followed that link, read a few messages, and found out that there was a recent offshoot: Pagan Good Eats, for the purpose of exchanging recipes used in rituals, etc.

Now, this is what I love about the Web: micro-niches. This group has nine members who are probably scattered in who knows where about the US. They're pagan fans of a cooking show that's hosted by a good-ol' boy from Atlanta. Before the Internet, these folks would never have been able to get together.

I give it a week before they split again into famtrad and neopag subgroups. Splitters!

I'm not sure if we've

I'm not sure if we've ever actually said that I do most of the cooking at home. But I'm certain that you folks know that we're geeks, which explains why we're big fans of Alton Brown and Good Eats, as Dori mentioned below. Another great food geek reference is Cook's Illustrated magazine. These folks have perfected the obsessive test kitchen approach to food; a typical thing for them is "We tested 347 ways to make mashed potatoes. Here's the best approach." Just in time for the holidays, here's their Turkey Help site.

When arch-conservatives like William Safire

When arch-conservatives like William Safire get concerned about the loss of civil liberties under Bush and Ashcroft, you know there's something to worry about. In Seizing Dictatorial Power, he details the frightening developments of the past few weeks.

Last month, I complained to

Last month, I complained to Jim Roepcke about the trouble I was having navigating his discussion group. A few days later, he had most of it fixed.

This afternoon, I whined to Dan Lyke about the trouble I had linking to his site. Within hours, he implemented a change I'd asked for.

Anyone else want a site usability critique?

Ooooh... via Breaching the Web,

Ooooh... via Breaching the Web, it's Alton Brown's new web site. And if you don't watch Good Eats, you should.

Yay! mac.scripting.com pointed to this

Yay! mac.scripting.com pointed to this article on how to Install Netscape's carbonized Java plug-in. Once I followed the directions, Java 2 applets now work in Netscape 6.2 on OS X. I ran across a number of display bugs, and it's not speedy, but hey, it's working!

Perhaps you noticed that just

Perhaps you noticed that just last weekend, the commentariat were howling that all was lost in Afghanistan, that America was in a quagmire, that the Taliban was invincible with winter coming on, that Bad Things were afoot. What an annoyance the actual events of the past few days must have been for that crew. Proving that even a conservative blowhard can be funny, Michael Kelly punctures some of the wailing press. Via Paul Music, who should probably start his own weblog, what with the number of links he's been feeding me.

I love reading stuff that's

I love reading stuff that's been translated using Altavista's Babelfish. This eBay auction, for instance.

The Drudge Report listed a

The Drudge Report listed a story today entitled "Man fined for putting fake news online...". Sadly, Drudge wasn't referring to himself.

Slate's Jacob Weisberg explains why

Slate's Jacob Weisberg explains why Gore Wins After All and how the big media outlets (the NYT, CNN, WSJ, et al) all wrote erroneous stories based on the recount data. Amazingly, the recount story became one-day news; it appears that having the loser of an election in the White House isn't very newsworthy. Yet, as I've read elsewhere today (sorry, can't find the reference) the media were perfectly able to keep on a story during the Great Fellatio Crisis of 1998. What a nightmare.

Just this season, we got

Just this season, we got hooked on Buffy. Yes, we know we're late to the party; you don't need to rub it in. Last week's episode was pretty amazing, not just because we liked the acting, but because, even a week later, we keep finding ourselves humming the tunes. Here's the lyrics, so that we'll have words to put with the music: Once More With Feeling.

I'm in a rotten mood.

I'm in a rotten mood.

For those who don't know, I've been running a variety of private and public mailing lists for years. They're all opt-in, with no problems, ever.

An AOL-using twit (sorry for the redundancy) reported me over the weekend to SpamCop. She didn't know how to unsubscribe, and thought that SpamCop was how to do it. It works best after you report a list as a spammer seven times, it seems.

So, I'm running into trouble now because this @#$ has reported me to SpamCop. She refuses to acknowledge that she over-reacted. It doesn't appear that SpamCop will let me off the hook, because she subscribed several years ago and I don't keep logs that long.

I have her name, her domains, her address, and her phone number. And it's really, really tempting to pull some of these stupid stunts, but I like to think of myself as a better person than that.

Anyone have any idea of legal ways to straighten this out, or, barring that, have some fun with her? Her info is available on request.

So, there went the concept of really trying to get some work done today...

Gore wins under six of

Gore wins under six of nine scenarios. It now appears that the Gore team got out-lawyered by the Bushies in Florida. But it seems that the legal outcome was, as we all suspected, different from the actual result of the election. Gore received more votes, so he was actually elected. But Bush managed to get more votes counted, and actually won. The Gore position was always "Count all the votes, and it will turn out that we won." Ironically, they abandoned that principle in favor of a narrower strategy that they thought would work out better. Had they stuck to their original course and been able to make a statewide recount happen, Gore would be president today.