Bullshit!

Last night, Tom and I watched the premiere episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!. I cannot recommend this show too highly. If you don't subscribe to Showtime, get it now, if only for this 30 minutes a week.

The currently running episode is "Talking to the Dead," debunking psychics who claim to be channelling your dead relatives. Next week is "Alternative Medicine," and the previews looked juicy. The episodes after those look even juicier.

And why the provocative title? According to Penn, if you call people liars and cheats, they can haul you into court for slander. But if you call them assholes pushing bullshit, they can't. And that's just the start of how P&T describe these folks.

We say: check it out. Highly recommended.

Blosxom 1.1 released

Rael released Blosxom 1.1 today, and Paul says at Forwarding Address: OS X that

...blosxom would be a great centerpiece in a beginner tutorial on dynamic web content. It does something nontrivial, interesting, and useful, but is not too complex to be comprehended. And its elegant use of the filesystem is a nice design lesson.

Which is why I used it for exactly that, in my "Webmaster 2003" workshop two weeks ago at Macworld Expo. It was a great way to sum up everything that I'd talked about over one very long day.

Buy from the Reaper?

I was looking at Amazon today, and I noticed a new icon in their navigation bar. I wondered, "Why would I want to buy clothes from the Grim Reaper?"

Disgusted Liberal

Here's a relatively new blog that's worth reading: DisgustedLiberal.com. The anonymous authors posts are fairly close to my own views. I've been disgusted with a lot of the tripe coming out of the left over the past year or so, yet the right is far worse.

Surreal, man

I remember seeing this years ago, I think, but it's still funny: The Surrealist Compliment Generator. Via Paul Music, who really should have his own weblog.

Another one drinks the Koolaid

Another friend has been assimilated: Jeff Carlson now has a blog. And if you've come from there to here looking for the Good Eats ringtone, it can be found here.

Spider on Eldred

In all the talk lately about Eldred v. Ashcroft, any number of comentators have mentioned Spider Robinson's story Melancholy Elephants. The editorial, The Mouse's pro Bono project, which disagrees with that story just came out, written by none other than Spider himself. It seems that while he's against copyright in perpetuity, he's in favor of limits longer than 70 years. Unfortunately, he doesn't tell us what he thinks that the limits should be.

Dean blog

Howard Dean 2004 is a blog that's serving as a clearinghouse for Dean info. Besides the latest Dean news, they also have a discussion forum. Tom sez check it out.

Calling to order order

I love niche stores on the web: The Gavel Store.

Squares

Just what I need: another incredibly addictive online game. This one's called Squares (requires Flash).

Welcome, but why?

If you're a regular visitor here, you may have noticed that we're not posting as often as we used to. For various reasons, the number of postings here ebbs and flows, and right now, it's at a low. It'll come back up again, I promise.

What's odd, though, is that for some reason, we've been getting tons of hits recently, and I can't figure out why. I can't find anything in my referrers that looks out of the usual, which means that we must have been mentioned either on a mailing list or in a Usenet post. If you got here by either of these methods, could you please put in the comments how you found this site?

But in general, welcome, and please come on back!

Words of the Year

It's strange for me to realize that this is the 4^th year in a row that I've blogged the American Dialect Society's Words of the Year. The winner for 2002 was, btw, "Weapons Of Mass Destruction" and its abbreviation, WMD.

Dean

We caught Howard Dean on CSPAN's Road to the White House last night, giving a speech at some Democratic event in Iowa. It was the first time that I'd heard him talk, and I was impressed. He was not a terribly polished speaker, but he was saying all the right things. He's right on the economy, right on most social issues, and best of all, he knows how to take the attack to the Republicans. We're thinking of giving him money. If you want to check Dean out, look at his site, and this site. The video of the event is still up on the C-SPAN site; I don't have a direct link, but you can find it if you look in their More Video link at the bottom of their home page.

Contribute VQS

I'm very happy to announce the publication of my latest book, Macromedia Contribute for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide. I got my hot-off-the-press copy on Friday, and the book should be available in stores and from the online stores in the next week or so.