Category: Uncategorized

Met OneMan and Hiram out for drinks last night. Jake was supposed to join us, but claimed a work-related obligation (I think it was that he just wanted to drive Cross’s 300m a little more) and had to take a rain check. It was a fun night, we’ll have to do it more often. See?…

Yesterday, I wrote about a local publication that ran two fabricated letters to the editor (also known as “astroturf”). I sent a brief note to the Editor in Chief of Sun Publications alerting him to the fact that both letters weren’t original letters but were in fact created at President Bush’s reelection website. To his…

Ernie: “You know, I don’t know if you are all aware of this, but ‘perpetuity’ is a really long time.”

Kos discovered another astroturf operation from the Bush campaign. Sure enough, the Naperville Sun (Correction: the letters ran in a sister publication, Fox Valley Villages) ran two of the form letters as letters to the editor last month (here and here.) In a nutshell, the Bush campaign: you can come hear us speak only if…

Not a moment too soon, Jay Allen has released an “emergency release” of MT Blacklist, the comment spam blocking plugin for Movable Type. Jay recently won the developer’s contest sponsored by Six Apart, and his victory was well-deserved. Unfortunately, a public release of his phenomenal tool wasn’t available until today for those of us who’d…

If you’re interested in learning more about Barack Obama’s background, you can pick up a copy of Dreams of My Father, his auto-biography he wrote ten years ago. It’s been out of print for a while (leading to a crazy couple of weeks on eBay, where copies could be bought for a few hundred bucks),…

Today’s Chicago Tribune has an interesting story on the front page of the Business section on Baker & McKenzie. Baker is the largest law firm in the world (by number of lawyers; Skadden and Clifford Chance both bring in more in revenues), and is based here in Chicago. The justification for chairman Christine Lagarde implementing…

I have vivid memories of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, Chuck Mangione playing in the background, watching on my parents’ RCA TV and marveling at the sports I had never heard of. I remember watching people who were the best in the world at what they do compete against the underdogs who were…

This must be why the “we’ve turned the corner” language is no longer in the stump speech. From This is Rumor Control: “The rhetoric coming out of the Bush administration has convinced Iran that military conflict is inevitable and rather than await an attack at a time and place of America’s choosing, the Iranians will…

This is too funny: The billboard is in Atlanta, Georgia. (Link courtesy of It’s Life’s Illusions I Recall.)