W Supports Outsourcing Prison Abuse To India

The Borowitz Report breaks the story about “a newly released White House memo outlining a controversial plan to outsource prison abuse to India.” The memo “details a scenario in which telemarketers from India would instruct Iraqi prisoners to remove their clothing and then would badger them with complicated offers involving their long-distance phone service.” Hilarious… ๐Ÿ™‚

Spider-Man To Be Outsourced

OK, not really, but I couldn’t resist. However, Marvel Comics is apparently developing “Spider-Man India,” which “interweaves the local customs, culture and mystery of modern India, with an eye to making Spider-Manโ€™s mythology more relevant to this particular audience.” For some reason, that costume just doesn’t seem to work…

The Terminal

Most of you have probably seen trailers for the upcoming Tom Hanks movie The Terminal, which is about a traveler stuck in an airport terminal because of bureaucracy over his documents. What you may not know is that this is based on the true story of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, and it’s a fairly involved (and somewhat sad) one at that. A French movie based on his story (entitled Tombรฉs du ciel or Lost In Transit) was also made in 1994. Still, I’d like to see The Terminal, as I’m thinking a Spielberg-Hanks collaboration should be pretty good…

Ukrainian Snickers Bar

I’ve known about this for some time, but this is the first time I’ve seen a story on it. The BBC reports that “One of the unhealthiest snacks in the world can now be found in Ukraine.” The delicacy? Pork fat (salo) covered in chocolate, also known as the Ukrainian Snickers bar. “It’s salty on the inside and very sweet on the outside. It’s unusual yes, but it’s completely disgusting,” says Dasha Khabarova, a Ukrainian student. Mmmm… chocolate-covered pork fat.

SpaceShipOne Makes History

SpaceShipOneYesterday Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne made history as the first private craft to fly into space. As Scaled Composites reports in its official press release,

Under the command of test pilot Mike Melvill, SpaceShipOne reached a record breaking altitude of 328,491 feet (approximately 62 miles or 100 km), making Melvill the first civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere and the first private pilot to earn astronaut wings.

The flight was apparently not flawless, as some control issues were experienced during the ascent. However, it seems clear that this team is a leading contender to win the prestigious X Prize, which awards $10 million to the first team to fly three people (or an equivalent weight) into space twice in two weeks.

Update from Denver

Today was a fairly interesting day, beginning around 4am with a tractor trailer being stolen by some drunk 16 year-old about a block from my apartment, driven the wrong way down my one-way street for about three blocks, and taking out some 14 cars along the way. Luckily, I have a parking spot in the alley, so I was not one of those unfortunate owners.

Later today, I joined the surprisingly large crowd that gathered in the rain to hear Hair France speak. Kerry gave a rousing stump speech, which was critical of the President, but focused on what he would do differently, instead of just the negative aspects. I didn’t get to shake his hand, but I got within about eight feet afterwards, before he left the scene in his motorcade.

But the biggest news of the day is that my show, “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”, is finally closing after more than four years in production, setting the record for the longest-running show in Denver history. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with this show as a sub for the master electrician, and more recently as a sub for the assistant stage manager and the two other stagehands. I’ve seen people come and go, some have stayed through the whole thing, and I myself started at the beginning in 2000 and left and came back again. I don’t have any official announcements to make at the moment regarding my future employment at the Galleria Theatre, but I hope to have some very positive news in the upcoming weeks.

Pop Goes The GMail

For those of you lucky enough to have a Google GMail account, someone wrote Pop Goes The GMail, which forwards GMail messages via the conventional POP3 protocol to your usual e-mail application. This might defeat the purpose of using GMail in the first place for some, as the web interface has its advantages, but I personally like the flexibility this offers.

By the way, I still have several GMail invitations left, so if anyone would like one, let me know and I’ll consider your request. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Comments

I think I’m going to try out Blogger’s built-in comments to see how well they work. Although Hossein Sharifi over at YACCS has done a good job with his commenting system, some of the lag times and bugs are getting annoying enough for me to look at this option. Using Blogger’s comments may have its own pitfalls, though. First of all, I’ll be depending on their server to host the comments, so that will probably cause some down time. More importantly, though, there’s no way to import all of the old comments people have submitted, which just sucks. I’m not sure how long it will take to properly code all of the changes, but I’ll post an update once it’s up and running so that you can let me know how it’s working.

Update: OK, I think I have the code right. Old comments are not visible anymore now that I removed that code, and I still need to fine-tune how things look. Another annoying thing is that although comment links are under all of the posts on my front page, they are only enabled from this post on. I guess this will be less of a problem as time goes on, but it still makes me wonder whether this is worth it. Entering comments is a little different, as you are directed to the “item page” which shows the original post, any existing comments, and a link to enter your own comment. I’m not sure whether I like that or not yet. What do you think?

Update II: Well, that didn’t last long. After some input on the new commenting system, I had to agree that there were too many things I didn’t like about Blogger’s commenting system for me to stay with it. It’s a shame, because I liked not having to deal with pop-up windows, but you had to jump through too many hoops to leave a comment, and it was not an intuitive process. I get few enough comments that it would be stupid for me to make it harder for people to leave them… ๐Ÿ˜‰