BunkBlog

You know that Don Henley song, Boys of Summer? There’s a line in there about a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. I recently saw the 21st century version – a No Fear sticker on a Jaguar. Of course, the Jag was being driven by someone who appeared to be 15, so I’m assuming it was a lieutenant that had used his commissioning loan to buy an overpriced car.

Another weird car I saw this weekend – a Dodge Stratus with a double-decker wing bolted to the trunk. Ranks up there with tricking out a Geo Metro for “WTF” factor.
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Man booby-traps his house, then triggers the traps.

Ah, Darwin…

Woman kisses man on forehead, could be sentenced to 74 lashes.

But Islamic laws are not in any way bizarre or anachronistic.

Man robs bank at the drivethru. Teller gives him money.
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Did you know that not all books pay royalties to their authors or estates? Public Domain is a great concept, in fact it is the default status for all works. Copyright is an artificial construct intended to encourage artists to publish their works, in exchange for a time-limited monopoly on copies. Gets the authors some money for their work, but the art is eventually free for all. When the USA was founded, copyright was set at 14 years, with an additional 14 year extension possible. Copyright now in the US is set at 70 years after the death of the author. Nuts, eh? How is giving his heirs a monopoly going to encourage the author to produce more work after he’s dead? The logic behind copyright is completely twisted by post-mortem rights, especially on the order of 2 generations.

Anyway, I’ve gotten up to 1995 in downloading the Gutenberg Project, and now I see this new thing. It’s a bookmobile that doesn’t loan books, it gives them out. That’s right, the books cost about one buck each, all nicely bound and laser-printed. The catch – the books are all public domain, which is the only way to afford giving them away, and led to my opening rant. Ta

Justin did Britney

Can you believe this is a Knight-Ridder wire story? Slow day.
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I’ve seen this a few times now and it never fails to amuse: caffeinated soap. heh
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Some stories you just have to read yourself. <Chuckle>
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This is such a complete shock. Wow, nobody saw this coming at all. Nope. Completely out of the blue.

Next revelation, OJ Did It!
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A restaurant run mainly by blind people, which has no lights.
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The total amount of sweetheart insider loans doled out to John Rigas (Adelphia), Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom), Stephen Hilbert (Conseco), Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco) and Ken Lay (Enron) was $3.9 billion.

With $3.9 billion, you could:

Fund Habitat for Humanity to build 83,691 homes at a cost of $46,600 each for America’s homeless.

Send 35,583 poor but deserving students to Harvard Business School.

Buy 390 million tickets to see “Austin Powers in Goldmember.”

Lend United Airlines the $1.8 billion it says it needs to avoid bankruptcy — twice. Or you could just flush the money down the toilet. The results will be the same.

Foot the bill for you and the 195 members of your high school class you really liked to ride a Russian rocket into space. The downside is, two of you will have to sit next to ‘N Sync’s Lance Bass.

Finance 39 equally priced sequels to Eddie Murphy’s $100 million flop, “Pluto Nash.” You could … but please don’t.

Buy every WorldCom shareholder a Xerox copier, some aspirin from Rite Aid, a year of long distance service from Qwest, and a share of Enron stock (suitable for framing).

Fund the SEC’s new, greatly increased annual budget for five years.

Still having a little trouble with the figures? Well, consider this: According to Fortune magazine, the total amount of money raked in by corporate executives selling company stock even while their companies crashed and burned was roughly $66 billion.

With $66 billion, you could:

Fund the annual budget of the FBI, corporate crime-fighting included, for 16 years.

Give 74 times what America currently gives in foreign aid to all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Cover the entire $25 billion America has spent fighting the war against terrorism in Afghanistan. And still have enough left over to give every Afghan more than two times their average yearly income.

Spend 132 million nights with Julia Roberts at the nightly rate she charged as the hooker in “Pretty Woman.”

Buy 3.3 billion copies of “Who Moved My Cheese?” But even if you read each and every one, you still couldn’t explain why it’s been a bestseller for over two years.

Pay President Bush’s $400,000 salary for 165,000 years. Although, if he’s anything like his dad, you’ll only be on the hook until 2004.

Pay the $1.08 million sales tax on Dennis Kozlowski’s artwork and still have $65.99 billion left to buy every masterpiece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impressionist collection at its assessed value.

I imagine your blood is really boiling now. But maybe still not enough to take action. Then try these numbers on for size:

The total loss in market value of WorldCom, Tyco, Qwest, Enron and Global Crossing was $427 billion.

With $427 billion, you could:

Fund the United Nations for the next 263 years, and still have $164 billion left over for unforeseen famine relief and peacekeeping missions.

Get Argentina back on its feet by paying off its external debt three times over.

Give $356 to every man, woman and child on the planet living in poverty.

Build and deploy 2,702 comet-hunting Contour satellites. The cost to track them down is extra.

Buy 61 billion packs of cigarettes, now $7 each in New York. Or you could transplant the lungs of 1.7 million patients — at $250,000 each — suffering from irreversible emphysema.

Order 34 billion prime-cut filet mignons from Omaha Steaks. Baked potato not included.

Pay the combined salaries of every player in baseball for the next 237 years. Although I don’t know why you would. Despite your generosity, they’d still disappoint you and go on strike.
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On this day in 1920, Christopher Robin Milne was born, an only child to A.A. Milne.
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Even better – they were live on the radio at the time. Makes Howard Stern seem tame…
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In 1994, the advertising agency Chiat/Day launched a program called the Virtual Office, where the employees didn’t get a desk and chair of their own, but had to find an open seat when they came to work and log on. The theory that Jay Chiat had was that this would encourage his ad execs to be on the move, and the office paradigm was outdated and useless. With cellular phones and portable computers, who really needed an office anyhow?

He was wrong. In 1998, the virtual office experiment was abandoned and Chiat/Day moved back into a normal office. Nobody liked the hunt for a desk, it became a big joke among the other ad agencies, and they finally gave up on making people do things that were unnatural.

Now, Scott McNealy of Sun has a similar idea, named iWork. Using smart terminals with server-based programs and data storage, McNealy expects to double the number of people per office. Wonder if he ever reads Wired or AdAge?
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This is the kind of story that you hope couldn’t happen in North America…
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According to the Washington Post story about a study in Nature, scientists have narrowed down the gene that allows humans to speak instead of grunting like chimps.

Now, they’re going to put that gene into mice. Stuart Little?

I think they’ll have better luck putting the gene into something a bit brighter than a rodent, like a chimp or orangutan. What will they think of next?
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So John Entwistle had a horse-load of cocaine in his system, but it was not an overdose? At what point does it become an overdose, as opposed to a heart attack exacerbated by drug use?
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OK, anyone in Germany needs to go help out the tourist industry of Munich. Go do your civic duty, and get naked!

My favorite quote:

“We’ve lost many of the nudists who made the English Garden a special place,” said park director Thomas Koester. “Especially good-looking young women and men who made it such an attraction aren’t here as much anymore. It’s becoming a real problem.”

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The MPAA and RIAA want to become their own law enforcement agencies, and the U.S. Congress is aiding and abetting them. This story has a few more details on a recurring trend among the major entertainment industry giants – they are not just above the law, they are the law.

Basically, the MPAA and RIAA want to be allowed to break into your computer if they have probable cause to believe you have stolen some of their music or video files. Since when do we allow anyone besides a legally recognized law officer to decide on probably cause? Why would anyone think it’s a good idea to encourage the entertainment giants to crack into your computer? Kind of raises the level of insanity a bit too far, in my opinion.

Of course, we should all feel reassured by the MPAA’s senior VP for government relations, who says that law-abiding Internet users should not be concerned. Yeah, that’s what a lot of police states tell you – if you have nothing to hide, why be worried about invasion of privacy?

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According to this story, several senators and the President are trying to allow the US Military to arrest civilians, adjusting the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878…
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The federal government wants you to download their software and run it on your machine. It will tell you if you’re vulnerable to attacks.

And, they also want you to spy on each other.

Yep, always trust the guy in the suit…
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This article is a bit disturbing at the beginning. There are folks selling “Ground Zero” hats and commemorative cups in New York, and even snow globes with the WTC towers in them. Capitalism will overcome anything, especially good taste and decorum.
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