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I’m not making this up. “Midge is sold as part of the ‘Happy Family’ set, wearing a tiny wedding ring and a detachable stomach with a curled-up baby inside. Her husband, Alan, and 3-year-old child Ryan are sold separately.” Wal-Mart is pulling the doll from its shelves, although it was supposedly due to customer complaints rather than any store policy. I don’t understand the problem here, although I suppose if it was a detachable wedding ring I can see why Wal-Mart’s typically conservative management would get in a huff.

Celebrity photographer Herb Ritts died last Friday at the age of 50. He was best known for his poignant black and white photography of people, from “pop culture icons to world leaders.” The Museum Of Fine Arts in Boston is currently exhibiting his work, and the MetaFilter discussion or a Google search on his work yield numerous online galleries and links. Ritts saw his photography as art transcending the subject matter; I tend to agree with his assessment and legacy:

Fifty or 60 years from now, if someone sees a portrait of Madonna, they really won’t care that it was Madonna or they won’t know who the hell she was. But it’ll hold up as a portrait of an interesting woman you want to know. You feel her. There’s something coming from it.

This entry in the Spyware Weekly Newsletter comments on the fact that Ad-Aware has not been updated for some time. I regularly use LavaSoft Ad-Aware to purge my system of spy-/ad-ware, but I had also noticed that there were no updates since late September and found it hard to believe that no new spyware had cropped up since then. This was confirmed to be true after reading the SpyWare Weekly article, although the Ad-Aware forum explains that a new version is due in February. Still, this is too long to be without updates or a new version, so at the suggestion of the article, I downloaded SpyBot Search And Destroy, a free utility similar to Ad-Aware that not only removes spyware, but also gives you the ability to remove keyloggers, dialers, usage tracks, trojans, and hijackers. It’s not as easy to use as Ad-Aware, unfortunately, at least not at first, but it seems to be at least as powerful and is definitely being updated often. I highly recommend running some utility of this kind to clean your system of the programs and add-ons that are installed without your knowledge, even if you only rarely install new programs, and especially if you use P2P clients like Kazaa etc.

Dave Barry’s weekly columns are hit or miss, but usually pretty funny. I really enjoyed his month by month year in review, though.

Check out the site and make your own Star Destroyer, AT-ST, and more…

16 years after the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, a 20,000-ton steel shell to enclose Chernobyl Reactor 4 is being built to contain the structure and allow cleanup to continue inside. I think it goes without saying that this effort is long overdue, but I had no idea how much work remained until I read this story…

GameSpy presents the “top 10 of the most seriously flawed titles of all time… not necessarily the worst, but the most wrong.” Although I can think of more, I think the Atari 5200 joystick and E.T. game definitely make my list.

Well, after a nice long Christmas holiday (and a bout with a nasty cold/flu), I’m back. I hope everyone had a nice Christmas holiday; I know I did despite feeling kind of shitty for most of it.    I should be posting more regularly now, although whether the New Year’s festivities interfere with that remains to be seen. 😉

The Three Wise Dudes

A Play in Five Acts

by Czar

Act I Scene 1 –

Setting: A long time ago, in a desert far, far away…

Narrator: Once upon a time, there were three wise dudes. They were totally mellow because they smoked frankincense and myrrh and things like that. One night they were sitting around getting an attitude change when one of them looked up at the clear night sky.

Wise Dude #1: Whoa, dudes! Check out that star, it’s like all psychedelic and shit.

Wise Dude #2: Whoa, that’s some groovy shit, man!

Wise Dude #3: Dudes, I think it wants us to follow it. We should totally go see where it goes.

Wise Dude #1: Yeah, totally!

Wise Dude #2: Dudes, wait up! We have to get more frankincese and myrrh.

Wise Dude #3: Oh yeah, and we should take the gold with us too, cuz what if we run out and have to get more?

Wise Dude #2: Dude, good call!

Narrator: The three wise dudes traveled through the desert for what seemed like days. It might have only been a half hour or so; it’s hard to tell when your stoned. Eventually, they came to a manger, finding a woman, a man, and a newborn child.

(The woman has flowers in her hair and is barefoot. She sits strumming a guitar. The man is off in a corner, stoned out of his mind, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. The baby is clothed in tie-dyed rags, sleeping peacefully.)

Wise Dude #1: Dudes, this must be where the star wanted us to go!

Wise Dude #2 (to the woman): Hey, you want some myrrh? It’s some good shit!

Woman: Yeah, totally! (Takes a hit.) Wow, this *is* good shit! Where did you get it?

Wise Dude #2: There’s this dude we know out in the desert. He fixes us all up.

Wise Dude #3: You’re totally groovin’ on that guitar, are you like in a band or what?

Woman: Thanks, yeah. My name is Mary, and I sing in a band with these two guys, Peter and Saul. That guy over there is Joseph, he’s our manager. He doesn’t really get us a lot of gigs, but he’s totally cool.

Wise Dude #1: Is he your husband?

Woman (giggling): Fuck no! I don’t even know where this baby came from. Might have been this guy I met after a gig in Jerusalem.

Wise Dude #3: Whoa, so like what are you going to do with the baby?

Woman: I’m totally going to raise him myself! I’ll teach him about peace, love, and rock & roll, ya know? He’ll be a long-haired hippy like me!

Wise Dude #2: That’s so cool! Dudes, we should totally give them some frankincense and myrrh.

Wise Dude #1: Yeah, totally!

Wise Dude #3: Oh yeah, and we should give them some gold, too, cuz what if they run out and have to get more?

Wise Dude #2: Dude, good call!

*Curtain*

To be continued…

…maybe…

…but probably not.

A bunch of researchers in Canada and Austria somehow pulled off every heterosexual male’s fantasy research project: Taking measurements of “every curve and contour of hundreds of Playboy models”. So what did they have to say at the end of the project? They used terms like “androgenous” and “stick insects” to compare the more recent models to the “hourglass” figures of the models from the 50’s.

Now guys, you can’t go saying stuff like that. Even if she’s a bit thin for your taste, you still need to focus on the positive. And whatever you do, pay some attention to her personality and feelings, too. Read the wisdom of Smoove B for a few pointers.