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Knoxify’s Friday Five

Knoxify is an excellent example of hyperlocal group blogging. The site has a beautiful design with a pleasant balance of photos and words with easy navigation to relevant information. The topic matter is Knoxville, TN and the articles always well written. To make Knoxify even better, they’ve introduced First Friday Five to feature the wonderful non-profits in Knoxville and encourage the Knoxify readers to donate $5 to the organization.

For their first First Friday Five, Knoxify choose one of my favorite non-profits, FISH Hospitality Pantries. FISH provides food and basic staples to any person or family in Knoxville who needs it with no questions asked. People of all economic backgrounds can find themselves in tight economic positions and FISH exists to make sure that no one goes hungry. Well chosen Knoxify!

Chattanooga also has First Friday Five.

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I don’t understand tea bagging.

Apparently on April 15 from 3pm-6pm, Republicans and Conservatives alike (perhaps Democrats and other parties) will be meeting at the World’s Fair Park for some tea bagging. As much as I enjoy a good protest, this just doesn’t sound like my kind of thing:

Teabagging is … an erotic activity used within the context of BDSM and male dominance, with a dominant man teabagging his submissive partner, either a woman or a man, as one variation of facesitting and/or as a means of inflicting erotic humiliation. [Source, Wikipedia, Teabagging]

Just sounds like someone’s going to get themselves arrested.

See also: Teabagging Congress.

Update 12April2009: Seen on The Huffington Post- “Tea Bagging” Rallies Ruthlessly Mocked On Maddow Show

Update: From Paul Krugman:

the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. [Source, The New York Times, Tea Parties Forever ]

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ShareThis WordPress Plugin Broken – Easy Fix!

I recently added a ShareThis link ShareThis.com to each of my posts. I chose ShareThis.com because it seems to be very robust while leaving a relatively small footprint on the blog and appears relatively unintrusiveness and benign. Of course, some folks will be quick to point out that the tracking features and having the icon linked back to sharethis.com is very intrusive and anything but benign. In this instance, I don’t see it as that big a deal. One of the attractions to ShareThis.com was its WordPress plugin making setup as easy as going to the website to generate the widget code, then inserting that code in the settings box on the admin screen in your WordPress blog. But it didn’t work.

At ShareThis.com, a publisher generates a script that looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345&amp;type=wordpress&amp;embeds=true&amp;post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&amp;headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!"></script>

After updating, the code will have a 2nd publisher id appended to the end. With two publisher ids, ShareThis will not register your site nor collect statistics.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345&amp;type=wordpress&amp;embeds=true&amp;post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&amp;headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!&amp;publisher=a1b2c3d4-ijkl-mnop-qrst-u4w2y10a2r4d"></script>

After reviewing the plugin code, I realized the way ShareThis generates the script must have changed overtime. Crowd Favorite wrote a great plug-in but it expects the publisher=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx to be at very end and if it does not find a publisher id at the end, it puts one there which is why you will end up with two publisher ids. To fix this, simply move the publisher id to the end of the script before pasting the code into the ShareThis settings box in the WordPress admin:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#type=wordpress&amp;embeds=true&amp;post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&amp;headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!&amp;publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345"></script>

Note: In the settings box, the &amp; will be converted to just & but the code correctly uses &amp; with the post. Your code will still be xhtml compliant.

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Questions from a wanna be Buddhist

When the day is spinning out of control, would stopping for 15 minutes of Daimoku help or make you feel 15 minutes more behind?

Buddhism is about revitalizing humanity, and transforming the world we live in from one dominated by greed, anger, and stupidity into one of peace and happiness. [Source, Jason Jarrett of A Buddhist Podcast, A Buddhist Podcast – Bodhisattvas of the Earth, 2:46-2:58]

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Active Thermite at WTC to Fuel Conspiracy Theories

Like the questions surrounding JFK’s assassination, I don’t think we will ever have definitive answers to what happened on September 11, 2001. Scientists, some who have since been released from their university or laboratory jobs, have released a paper "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" which will likely have conspiracy theorists once again presenting their arguments that the plane alone could not have destroyed the World Trade Center.

We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. … The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic. [Source, Bentham Open Access,Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe]

For more information on the super-thermite, read The Raw Deal.

Today on Reddit, the question was posed "2,740 Americans died in 9/11, justifying the removal/restrictions of many of our freedoms. How many people died to give us those rights in the first place?" Within the answers, this illuminating comment:

It’s sort of a nationalistic cliche to say that soldiers fight for our freedom but what they really fight for is the sovereignty of our government, which happens to guarantee us certain freedoms.

When we say a soldier died fighting for our freedoms, what we really mean is that he died in a war which threatened the loss of some or all of American sovereignty to a foreign or domestic power which would likely guarantee less rights than the present government.

This distinction is important because in the history of American wars, very few have definitively fallen under that category – and even in those cases, preserving the rights of American citizens was ancillary to sustaining or expanding the sovereign power of the U.S. government.

[Source, Reddit.com, 2,740 Americans died in 9/11, justifying the removal/restrictions of many of our freedoms. How many people died to give us those rights in the first place?]

We now live with a generation that has never known the feeling, the freedoms, we had prior to September 11, 2001. There is a different feeling. I felt more secure! I wish my youngest children could know that feeling and could experience true trust. I have lived with a tension since 9/11 that I had not known prior. The tension is not from a fear of terrorists; they’ve always been around (well, at least from the 1960s First U.S. Aircraft Hijacked, May 1, 1961 and at least 1800BC for the rest of the world). The fear is from my own government! Prior to 9/11 the police were different; now everyone should fear the police.

Question: “The police are here. They want to talk to me. What should I do?”

Answer: “Make no statement to the police under any circumstances.”

– Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson

[Source, Brasscheck TV, Why you should
never talk to cops
without a lawyer
]

The terrorists won.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

[Source, Bruce Schneier – Security Expert, Refuse to be Terrorized]

Whether the terrible incident of September 11, 2001 was foreign or domestic terrorism, whether it was solely the plane or the plane timed with well placed explosives is irrelevant. Our society has dramatically changed, some say irrevocably. We were a better America when we could trust our government. We were a better America when the police were not the enemy. We were a better America before Civil liberties were taken away.

See also: Timeline of Terrorism dating back to 1800BC and History of Terrorism 70s to 2001.
See also: Professor Says "Cutter Charges" Brought Down WTC Buildings (Issue #18 & 19, May 1 & 8, 2006)

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Justine Lai Does The Presidents

laijoinordie01thumbI clicked a link in one of my news readers today and was presented with a gallery where San Francisco artist Justine Lai has painted herself having sex with several presidents (NSFW). She’s a good oil painter. A bit of an odd subject. Definitely not safe for work. And I think Ol’ Abe is going to shoot her in the head.

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Claiming your kidnapped child on your taxes

Folks, as tax season closes up many of us may rush through doing our taxes to meet the April 15th deadline. I wanted to point out a couple of details about your kidnapped child. Remember, if you plan on claiming your kidnapped child as a dependent, make sure that the kidnapper is not someone in your family or the child’s family (I’m not terribly clear on how the two are differentiated). Also, the child must have lived with you for at least one half of the portion of the year that they were actually with you. And remember, the child can no longer be claimed a dependent the year after they would have become 18 years of age because, well, they’re not with you and they are adults which makes them emancipated…they’ll claim themselves. For the actual IRS language, see Topic 357 – Tax Information for Parents of Kidnapped Children Last Reviewed or Updated: November 25, 2008. Those people at fairtax.org just haven’t thought about all the possibilities that Uncle Sam has already covered for us!

This post with apologies to anyone who actually has a kidnapped child.

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TN Continues to Make Dumb Laws

Michael Silence notes that Sen. Jim Tracy is trying to pass legislation that would make it illegal to read or send text messages while driving. These nanny state laws treat symptoms and not problems. My comment on No Silence Here:

We don’t need a nanny state! We need better education. IF we would teach people how to use T-9 then they could text without looking at the phone! er, I mean if we taught people the importance of not texting behind the wheel. You know..give a man a fish..well if he were eating fish while driving that would probably be bad too. Maybe we need a law to ban eating fish behind the wheel. Yes! Definitely. And fishing licenses. When the police pull cars over they should check for fishing licenses because he might be planning on catching a fish to eat while driving and we need to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s important. Important enough that we need to set up road blocks and check everyone’s fishing licenses!! But then people might send text messages warning about the road blocks. No, we outlawed text messaging behind the wheel so that would never happen of course neither would the eating fish behind the wheel because we outlawed that too so why do we need the road blocks? You know, the radio stations will pick up on these quickly. We should outlaw radios in the cars. Wait a minute, wasn’t there a time when legislatures feared car radios would cause too many accidents and deaths. What happened to outlawing radios? Wait another minute. At least 2 people died in his district while text messaging behind the wheel. I wonder how many died tuning their radio?

Things we need to outlaw to keep people alive:
spiders, aids, diving, earthquakes, buildings, sports, suicide (wait, that’s already illegal), alcohol, lightning, steps, cold, heat, cancer, tall places, bees, surgery, and sharks.
http://i28.tinypic.com/5v0v1d.jpg

The problem with these types of laws is that it does nothing to prevent the happening but only punishes if and when it is caught. To educate people to pull over, have a passenger do the texting, or just plain ignore the phone is a better use to time and tax dollars than more laws:

Republican Sen. Mae Beavers of Mt. Juliet opposed the bill because of provisions in the current law.
"I really don’t see the need for the bill," she said. "I’ve said time after time, I don’t think we can legislate against stupidity."

Furthermore, driving is a skill and not everyone has the same abilities. That is not a statement to justify one person texting behind the wheel while another doesn’t but to point out the people who are crossing the center line while texting may just as well be doing the same thing while reading a billboard, talking to a passenger, tuning the radio, or daydreaming. We have all done stupid things while driving. I bet everyone at one point has turned the wrong way down a one way street. I did in Memphis as a teenager. It scared me silly to see 3 lanes of lunch hour traffic barreling down on me. A law preventing me from going the wrong way on a one way street would have done nothing to prevent me from making that silly mistake..wait a minute..it is against the law to drive the wrong way on a one way street….oh.

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Watchmen Review – No Spoiler

Who Watches the Watchmen?Cathy and I were privileged to go see the midnight showing of Watchmen last night. (See Official Watchmen website) First a note to myself: if you are going to act like a college student and watch a 3 hour movie starting at midnight, set an alarm for the morning. I lay in bed this morning trying to convince myself it was Saturday; then Noah’s whisper, "Dad. It’s 7:15" startles me from bed. Fortunately, everyone made it to school on time…and with lunches!

My Thoughts

In short: Go see this movie! But leave the children at home.

Astounding! Lighting choices, sets, camera angles, use of slow motion and stop action made me not want to blink. They sucked me into the screen and I did not want to miss a millisecond. The vivid colors and contrasts brought enough comic book element without crossing the cheesy boundary. The sounds were crisp and took great advantage of the theater setting. This movie certainly deserves at least one viewing on a big screen. The musical soundtrack was perfect falling into the must purchase category. The story was well told. The movie ran three hours and I was glued to the screen for every second. I may even go back and watch Watchmen in the Imax theater!

Rating/Parent Warning

Watchmen is rated R for strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language. As you drop your children off at the theater to watch this movie based on a comic book, remember that comic books were not always written for children. This is an adult movie. Watchmen has graphic violence that may turn some heads from the screen. The sex in the movie is hot! And only outdone by the sex after the movie. [pseudo spoiler]You will see breasts, nipples, butts and penises. You will see blood.

History

Read wikipedia’s Watchmen article for a great description of how Watchmen came to exist. In short, Watchmen represented a stark change from how superheros were typically represented. Even the presentation of the comic book was different in style. In high school, I was a comic book collector and a huge D.C. fan. I visited monthly comic book conventions and had my own "pusher" who would advise me on the hot series. I was really into the miniseries. I found Crisis on Infinite Earths very exciting as the D.C. continuity problems were to finally be fixed but all the tie ins and crossover series burned me out on comic collecting. Unfortunately, I quit collecting comics in 1986 when Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was released. My pusher insisted that was a story I shouldn’t miss and that it would instantly be valuable. He was right. I should own the first release of The Dark Knight and I should have Watchmen. I remember Watchmen, but regretfully, I do not think I have a single issue downstairs. Cool! Last night I dug out my old comic box and discovered I have the entire 12 issue Watchmen series in bagged in mint condition! I suppose I should say near mint; nothing is every truly mint. I even have 2 copies of issue 12. The desire to take them out and flip through their pages is almost worth more than the $250 the set appears to be going for on eBay. What I do have is the Punisher series but that movie was rotten. But I digress. Quit reading this and go watch the movie!

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Technologies to come

Someone titled this "Microsoft’s Vision for 2019" I don’t know if that is true or not. What I do know is that much of what is presented in this video is already in the works. I’ve seen some of it demo’d. I know we have the technology to be deploying some of it today but necessary infrastructure improvements and profit margins stand in the way. For instance, if Nokia has a plan to release version A B C D and E of a phone there is a good chance that while were are using version A that B C D and E are in the works if not already developed. If B and E were developed at the same time Nokia could sell E but would miss out on all the profits by release B then waiting awhile to release C and awhile longer to release D and so forth. It doesn’t make fiscal sense to jump ahead. If money were not the issue and the technology improvements were solely about the advancement of society, you can bet we’d jump from A to E.

2019 is too far away. We need these technologies today! Freeze me and wake me in 100 years.

Update: Take a look at how AT&T envisioned the future back in 1993. Pretty amazingly on the nose!

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Today’s Glorious Spam

Today I got spammed on Twitter by someone trying to get me to join a lesbian match making website. Uh. I think I fail most of the criteria. You know. Like I’m not single. Cathy and I haven’t reached the swingers or wife swapping point in our relationship yet. Oh, yeah. I don’t have a vagina!

ps. If you are going to trick me into going to an adult website, you could at least provide a thumbnail gallery! Just kidding. I’m not conservative enough for viewing porn and I don’t live in Utah. (NewScientist: Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers )

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Get 14,000 Followers On Twitter In One Day

How do you get 14,000 followers on Twitter in one day? Be the Dalai Lama! You can follow His Holiness at @OHHDL and of course visit the Dalai Lama website. And, on a lesser note, you can follow me on Twitter @djuggler.

Update: The title should have actually been How to go from 0 to 14,000 to 0 followers on Twitter in one day considering @OHHDL was an impostor. See Willfull’s comment..